


the great big map of everything

by perennials



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Childhood Friends, Dimension Travel, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, M/M, updates every thursday GMT+satan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-06-24 03:51:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 57,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15621918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: If you’re reading this, then I’m already gone. But I was kind of expecting that, so it’s okay.Catch you in the next world, Tsukki.-Kuroo Tetsurou has a voice like an old, sad song on the radio. He also has ridiculous hair, fifteen bomber jackets, and the kind of smile that looks so good, it should be illegal. Kei wants to kiss it right off his face sometimes. He doesn’t.Then Kuroo goes missing, and Kei can’t kiss him at all even if he wants to.So he does the next best thing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ll let you in on a secret,” Akiteru finally says. “No one really thinks he’s dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tsukki is 18 in present time; kuroo is 20
> 
> content warning: very vague descriptions of drowning  
> other content warning: this was meant to be a prologue but then it got long. real action starts next chapter, if you'll give it a chance til then

_That is why it is called longing. It has to go a long way. To the ends of the earth._

  
  


The world doesn’t come to a standstill when Kuroo Tetsurou goes missing.

 

The call comes in from Yamaguchi at half past seven in the morning, after Kei has changed into his uniform and dragged his bag out of his room and gotten breakfast. The first day of the school week is always a tragedy in the making, especially at the tail end of winter; there’s pale gray light falling over everything like a funeral, and Kei’s already-cold hands are even colder than usual.

 

It’d be an odd time to call for anyone else, but Kei knows Yamaguchi’s hours are as chaotic as his grades are in school. He doesn’t think much of it.

 

“Have you heard from Kuroo lately?” Yamaguchi’s voice tries to be deceptively neutral, but succeeds only at sounding very deceptive.

 

“No,” Kei replies, picking idly at his cereal. “What’s he done this time.”

 

“Um,” Yamaguchi says, a little strained. “He hasn’t done anything.”

 

Kei frowns. “Isn’t that great? What’s the problem then?”

 

_What’s the problem? What’s wrong?_

 

Sometimes when you’re standing on the train platform of the _Yamanote_ line at the asscrack of dawn, surrounded by dead tired students and more-dead-than-tired salarymen, there’s a moment. When neither the train nor the station announcement has come yet, but you can tell that it’s on its way anyway. When you can feel the phantom-shaking of the ground beneath your feet, the telltale whistle of metal-on-metal. Imagine that kind of quiet anticipation; the unmistakable sense of impending _something_. All the students and salarymen lining up by the doors without saying a word. The train, coming from far, far away.

 

That is exactly how Kei feels this morning, when Yamaguchi calls him and his voice is less annoying than usual, less flighty— like there’s a train in the distance. He can’t see it, but he can feel it approaching. The smooth marble flooring he can’t really feel through his socks is shaking. The kettle in the kitchen is whistling. Impending something. Impending collision.

 

And then Yamaguchi speaks:

 

“Tsukki,” he says, and Kei braces, inadequately, for the impact. “He hasn’t done anything for three weeks. We’ve lost his signal.”

 

☉

 

The world doesn’t come to a standstill when Kuroo Tetsurou goes missing.

 

This is not a surprise for anyone. After all, there are bigger accidents in Tokyo than boys with apocalyptic smiles and tacky red bomber jackets. Bigger, crueler accidents. After all, there are more pressing affairs, like global warming, and the failing economy, and the bizarre fact that all the _konbini_ coffee machines across the city simultaneously broke down on Monday and now everyone is walking around in the tail end of winter, carrying cold coffee in cold styrofoam cups.

 

Tsukishima Kei’s world doesn’t come to a standstill when Kuroo Tetsurou goes missing, quite as much as it simply doesn’t. It doesn’t. It stops being, properly. He’s not quite sure what to do. He stares at his cereal, the soggy fruit loops bobbing up and down and up and down. His cereal stares back up at him, mouths open in delicate little ‘o’s.

 

“What do you mean?” He asks.

 

Kei can hear Yamaguchi’s grimace over the phone.

 

“Just come.”

 

☉

 

The water from the faucet in the kitchen sink is cold, like kissing Antarctica. Kei imagines he’s bigger than it and everything’s all right. Kei pretends his hands aren’t his hands, these fingers the property of someone else, the cold Antarctic water flowing between them heading somewhere far away from him.

 

☉

 

Kuroo’s magic trick is simple. He says _I’ll be back,_ points at the bleached-blue sky, and then leaves.

 

Kuroo may be talented, but he is still only twenty. That means a lot of things in a lot of different situations. Some of them are bad; all of them are dangerous.

 

It’s not uncommon for twenty year old divers to go missing— even less so because Kuroo is a coda diver, always has been, could never be anything else. The work they do is risky, like rock climbing without a harness, except the rock wall is a mountain face, and your hands are slick with oil. At the top of each mountain lies something unimaginably beautiful. At the bottom of each mountain lies the belongings of dead people.

 

Kuroo has never been factored into any projection of death-tolls, any disturbed daydreams.

 

Still. Still.

 

Kei doesn’t go to school. Instead, he hails a taxi in the early-morning fog down to east Tokyo and gets out in front of a glittering glass skyscraper. It’s sleek and sharp and nothing like the rest of the equally-tall buildings that surround it. It’s sleek and sharp and secret.

 

The elevator in the lobby takes him up to fortieth floor, which is the floor that he knows the best. The sharp geometry of the lift lobby gives way to an open two-story space with floor-to-ceiling glass windows encasing the entire area like a greenhouse. There’s a kitchen to the left and haphazard rows of cubicles and monitors down the middle; on the right, a short flight of steps leads to what Kei knows is the diamond pool.

 

He hasn’t been in there since he was eight. He hasn’t been here, to this floor with its coffee colored chairs and endless daylight-nightlight confusion in a while. If Kei walked to the end of the third row from the left he would find a cubicle, familiar like the hand of a stranger you loved in a past life. If Kei had walked to the end of the third row from the left, he probably wouldn’t have to be here today at all.

 

But the point is, he didn’t. Yamaguchi finds Kei standing like a shutterstock image in front of the cubicles, littered with crumpled candy wrappers and discs of sunlight. Tugs on the sleeve of his buttoned shirt until he starts to move, jolting into action, and then leads him down a different row of cubicles.

 

The exchange is, for the most part, matter-of-fact. Kei is grateful, through his silence, through which he cannot express his gratitude, for Yamaguchi’s understanding, for the way he barrels through the truths and the errors and the missteps, the mistakes. His account is objective even if his expression is twisted with concern. His hands never stop moving.

 

He talks about the last mission Kuroo had taken up and his disappearance halfway through it and how they all thought he’d simply shut off his transmitter the way he likes to do sometimes when he’s in one of his moods, about the radio silence that they let go on for two weeks before they thought to check. He talks about how they’d finally found his transmitter, washed up like a heartbeat in the two-moon realm. How they didn’t find Kuroo.

 

Kuroo’s magic trick is simple. It goes like this.

 

He says _I’ll be back,_ and then he doesn’t come back.

 

Kei is grateful that Yamaguchi knows him well enough to hold back the avalanche of concern Kei knows must be knocking on the roof of his mouth. Ten years of friendship, ten years of persistence, and Yamaguchi knows. He always does.

 

But he can’t stay completely silent, because Yamaguchi is Yamaguchi, and his heart is soft like that.

 

Hesitantly: “He might not be—“

 

“He’s not dead,” Kei cuts in, his voice ringing like funeral bells. He doesn’t know how to explain that he knows, that this is a statement of fact, that in this brief moment clairvoyance has left him with a fleeting touch. He doesn’t know how, but he knows.

 

“I trust you,” Yamaguchi says after a pause, and then he reaches up and puts a hand on Kei’s shoulder, and Kei is grateful, again. Quietly.

 

A row of haphazard, too-big cubicles away, a ghost emerges from the squeaky spinning office chair, _Tsukki_ , it says.

 

_Tsukki, I can explain, I’m sorry._

 

_Tsukki._

 

☉

 

Kuroo Tetsurou has a voice like an old, sad song on the radio, so Kei tries not to think too much about it. It’s both exceedingly annoying and exceedingly soft. Kei can’t stand it either way.

 

Kuroo has a voice like his favorite song. But that’s weird, and wrong, because Kei doesn’t have a favorite song. Kei has a favorite person (not-Akiteru), a favorite season (fall, when everything dies so it can be born again and better), a favorite pair of headphones. Kei is fourteen and those headphones are white, and he takes them everywhere with him.

 

He’s not in high school yet, but he will be soon. Not that it means anything to him, because it doesn’t, but Kuroo warbles about it from the other end of Kei’s bed like he’s thirty-six instead of sixteen. His hands are buried in Kei’s UFO-patterned blankets, the fabric bunched up between those pretty fingers.

 

Kuroo’s wearing a tacky bomber jacket, riot red with a mustard yellow dragon on the back and the words _Tokyo Dreaming_ embroidered in looping cursive underneath that. He thinks it’s the coolest thing ever. Kei thinks it’s lame.

 

It probably is. The jacket might be acceptable in another world, where Kuroo dresses like a rockstar expressly for entry into his best friend’s house; in this world, Kuroo turns up at Kei’s in a baggy white shirt and drawstring pants _and then_ throws it on over that whole mess. It’s a disaster.

 

“It’s just high school,” Kei says dismissively, and turns the page on his comic. His toes are cold because Kuroo’s snatched up all the blankets and wrapped them around himself like a cocoon. Kuroo is an asshole.

 

“Wrong,” Kuroo laments, sounding very sure of himself. “It’s about growing up. You’re growing up.”

 

“You sound like you’re thirty-six,” Kei tells him.

 

Kuroo flashes him the tail-end of a grin, leaving behind a trail of heat and light the way comets probably do. Kei’s not sure, because they haven’t covered these things in science class yet, but he’s also sort of sure, because Kuroo’s told him about comets and shooting stars and all those bright, distant things before. Kei sort of knows.

 

“Maybe I am,” Kuroo replies, stage-dramatic and brilliant. Pretentious. “I could secretly be an old man trapped in a child’s body.”

 

“A _teen’s_ body,” Kei corrects, but doesn’t bother with the rest of his sentence.

 

Kuroo is unmistakably, impossibly sixteen. He does all his homework after midnight and texts Kei in the middle of class and quotes Kant and Descartes to make himself sound cool, half-lidded eyes like melted butter under all that bird’s nest bedhead. He flirts with a razor-sharp smile, the sort everyone admires but no one wants to get close enough to to touch. He has pretty fingers, a pianist’s fingers, and they’ve always been lively, dancing on tabletops, fiddling with pens and pencils and plastic straws, but lately he’s become even more restless, his fingers drumming intricate rhythms into Kei’s beanbag chair, his knees, the carpeted floor. Every part of him except his curled left pinky, coloring book-vivid.

 

Lately he’s been looking like he wants to cut a hole in the sky, and then step right through it.

 

Kei is fourteen, and high school is not here yet. His heart is not here yet. He doesn’t know what to do.

 

☉

 

The world doesn’t come to a standstill when Kuroo Tetsurou goes missing.

 

The simple matter of fact is, it can’t. The other matter of fact is, Kuroo is only one diver amidst hundreds, and even if he had indeed been fished out of the Flow like a stray cat, his special treatment only extends as far so as to encompass the specifics of his cubicle, which is at the end of the third row from the left. Kuroo got to choose where to sit, and a beanbag chair. That’s all he ever talks about.

 

The search party returns a week later with the still-functioning transmitter and nothing else. Sawamura’s brows are drawn so tight across his forehead, they look like they’re going to crash right into each other. Iwaizumi stares at his feet, and then at Oikawa. Oikawa stares at an invisible spot on the far wall and tries to look like the leader of a search team who has his shit together.

 

The party of three emerges in the evening from the sparkling diamond pool on the fortieth floor, and they leave dark trails of water everywhere they go. Oikawa’s voice is twice as loud as usual when he announces that they’re heading back to Communications, dripping wet like all of them are.

 

“We couldn’t find anything else.” Oikawa’s voice is still twice as loud as usual, but it is also twice as serious. Kei doesn’t remember the last time he heard Oikawa sound so serious. He wishes he’d never have had to.

 

The crew at communications takes apart the transmitter like it might be full of rubies, but there’s nothing inside except wires and screws and magic. Kenma’s gaze is blank as he hands it to Kei, who has been hanging around at POOLS all day, drinking coffee and ignoring his parents’ phone calls. Kei takes it and feels the weight immediately, like he’s holding a whole life in his hands. That’s funny. It shouldn’t feel like that.

 

Later on in the day, he goes to find Akiteru the traitor, one part reluctant and two parts ready to crumble apart like apple pie. He doesn’t even like apple pie all that much, but he can feel himself collapsing, his stoic expression flickering the way it should only flicker when Kuroo smiles without the knife-edge to it or Yamaguchi calls him out on something silly. His parents are still mad that he skipped school again, and he can’t do this. He’s still eighteen, still made of helium and high school horror stories. His head hurts.

 

Akiteru’s work cubicle is situated as far from Kuroo’s as possible, still on the fortieth floor, still where all the divers hang out like nocturnal animals through the wee hours of the morning. He’s off duty, a day or two fresh from a mission, looking intensely alive and thrumming with energy. It makes him the exact opposite of Kei right now. It makes him even more annoying than usual.

 

But Akiteru turns around in his not-squeaky office chair when Kei steps in and takes the resurrected transmitter. He looks straight at Kei.

 

“How are you holding up?”

 

“Fine,” Kei answers shortly, feeling anything but. Feeling everything, and feeling it too much.

 

Akiteru hums, tugs absentmindedly at the collar of his striped shirt.

 

“Mom and dad are pretty pissed, y’know,” he says lightly.

 

“So am I.”

 

“I see.”

 

Silence.

 

Akiteru raises an eyebrow. “Pissed?”

 

And here it is, the avenue Kei had been looking for all day, the open doorway through which he can shove all of his stupid chaotic teenage thoughts. Akiteru looks suitably curious and alarmed, and Kei’s head fucking hurts, so he takes the opening.

 

“He isn’t dead. He isn’t dead, probably just hiding somewhere out in the realm of useless stray cats or something, sipping champagne and shit. This is Kuroo Tetsurou we’re talking about, he can’t be fucking dead. I’m going to hit him when he gets back.” Kei’s voice is hot and hard and angry, but it’s a relief to get the words out, like they’ve been stuck in his throat all day, scratching at his insides, scratching at his heart. He believes all of it, and he knows it. He believes everything he says.

 

Akiteru rests his elbows on his knees and steeples his fingers. Kei takes breath after breath of warm, processed air, and tries to stay on his feet.

 

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Akiteru finally says. “No one really thinks he’s dead.”

 

Kei’s world bursts open, curtains flapping like white flags in the breeze.

 

“Oh,” he says. “Oh.”

 

☉

 

When Kei is five years old, he meets Oikawa at the playground.

 

At this age, Kei is still small and sweet and rosy. He digs his hands into the sandbox with the sort of enthusiasm only a toddler can possess, flings fistfuls of sand into the air, and then laughs as it all dissolves away from him.

 

Oikawa finds him like that, hands caked with sand and face shining with grime in the warm light of dusk.

 

Oikawa is a little bit older than Kei, and therefore a lot more annoying. His hair is the color of dead leaves in fall and he looks like an alien. Still, the wonder in his voice compensates for the fact that he steps into the sandbox and promptly knocks over Kei‘s architectural masterpiece. Or masterpieces, perhaps, because all Kei’s done is create a bunch of hills. Up and down and up and down. Sloping and sprawling all over the place.

 

He puts one foot inside a half-demolished valley, then looks at Kei with flashlight round eyes.

 

“You know, my parents are divers.”

 

Kei looks at him passively. “I like swimming,” he says.

 

“Not that kind of diving!” Oikawa trods unsteadily to his side, squats down and digs his flip flops into the sand.

 

“They go to other worlds. And mom told me there’s this really important thing called the Flow which either likes you or hates you, but she says it likes me, so I’m okay. That means I can go to other worlds when I get older too. Don’t you want to see them?”

 

Kei is five and kind of tired of excavating the sandbox, because he hasn’t found a single dinosaur in it, living or dead. He didn’t really mean to build the mountains; they just kind of appeared. He didn’t really mean to start a conversation with Oikawa, either, and he has no idea what the loud, starry-eyed boy is saying anyway, so he turns his attention back to the ground. Claps his hands together to try and get the sand out of his fingers.

 

“I dunno. Maybe.”

 

Oikawa looks severely unimpressed. He stands up, dusts himself off meticulously.

 

“You’ll want to one day. I’m sure of it. Don’t come crying to me then!”

 

Kei still has no idea what he’s talking about, but Oikawa sounds annoyed, or indignant, or something, so he nods and sees him off with a wave goodbye.

 

He forgets all about the exchange until he is eight years old and it is bring-your-kid-to-work day at school. He follows his parents into a glittering glass skyscraper that’s so tall he can’t quite see the end of it, stepping through tall, revolving doors and trotting, lost-lamb quiet past all the suit-clad personnel. They take the elevator up to the twenty-fifth floor.

 

Kei spends the whole day shadowing his parents like a very small, very sour-faced specter, drifting from one end of the floor to the other, pressing his palms up against all sorts of strange glass exhibits, shying away from curious strangers. At one point, they walk past a door with three metal bolts and a lock the size of a watermelon wrapped around them.

 

Kei still has no idea what his parents do for a living. He’s not sure if he wants to know.

 

But at the end of the day he sits down on one of the high chairs around the dining table and his father puts a glass of warm milk in front of him, and Kei feels like an adult, and his parents speak to him. They talk about realms, and dimensions where people live on the moon, and diving. They talk about the Flow, and how it likes some people and hates others, but anyone can dive if they have an anchor, and how everyone needs an anchor. They talk about other worlds.

 

Kei absorbs everything from his very adult chair at the dark mahogany dining table, and sips his milk. Interjects only once to ask if there are dinosaurs (yes, of course, and unicorns, and mermaids, but Kei doesn’t care about the rest). Thinks about the weird boy with the starry eyes who kicked down his sandbox sculptures.

 

“Do you understand? Your dad and I do very serious, very secret work,” his mother says, voice heavy with the weight of that secret.

 

Kei nods. He likes swimming, the aquamarine tint of pool-water, doing somersaults with his nose pinched shut.

 

Diving sounds kind of fun.

 

☉

 

When Kei is eight, he almost—

 

He doesn’t. The water. The water. He never wants to go to Antarctica (again).

  
When Kei is eight and barely-breathing and surrounded by sixteen shades of blue, he—

 

Nothing. Nothing at all. The point is, he doesn’t. He almost, but he doesn’t. It’s all in the past now. It doesn’t matter.

 

☉

 

Kei doesn’t come crying to Oikawa, but he does go to him.

 

Or, at least, he tries to. What actually happens is that Kei finds Bokuto reclining against the plush, faux-velvet chair in his cubicle, holding a can of Arizona green tea from the fridge. Oikawa’s name is scribbled on a sticky note tacked onto the side.

 

“He’s not here,” Bokuto says, like it isn’t obvious enough.

 

Kei already has a foot outside when Bokuto leaps out of the chair like a coiled spring and grabs him by the wrist.

 

“ _Actually!_ He’s at the coffee shop. You know which coffee shop?”

 

“I know which coffeeshop.”

 

“Okay, cool! Good luck. Have fun.”

 

“I am not going to have any fun, but thank you for the luck.”

 

Bokuto offers him another can of Arizona tea that doesn’t belong to him. Kei puts his other foot outside of the cubicle.

 

☉

 

Incidentally, he _does_ know which coffee shop Bokuto was talking about. Anyone who works at POOLS has to know about it, and Kei, by pure merit of having parents and half his friend group involved with the criminally-suspect organization in one way or another, has probably spent the equivalent of three years there, doing homework and being harrassed by the entire universe.

 

The entire universe can be summed up in Hinata, who exudes the kind of early morning energy that makes Kei immediately want to curl up in bed and go to sleep.

 

He works weekday afternoon shifts sometimes. That, by extension, includes afternoons like this.

 

Hinata lets out a sound like a rooster trying to wake up the entire neighborhood when Kei walks into The Caged Bird (coffee, cake, and camaraderie!), the warm air inside blowing pleasantly against his cold cheeks. This succeeds in drawing the attention of everyone in the coffee shop, Oikawa included.

 

Ignoring Hinata, Kei makes a beeline for Oikawa, who is seated with one leg crossed over the other in a big fluffy armchair in the far corner of the coffee shop. Oikawa is wearing the most vividly turquoise pullover Kei has seen in his life.

 

Kei sits down opposite him in the other big, fluffy armchair.

 

“Let me guess,” Oikawa is already saying before Kei has even gotten himself comfortable, before Kei has managed to compose his thoughts into a legible music score of words. “It’s Kuroo.”

 

Kei wants to flick him on the forehead. But they’re older now, and they have restraint, and Kuroo. Oikawa is right. It’s about Kuroo.

 

He nods, a flicker-flash of movement.

 

Oikawa examines his fingernails, which are well-manicured and shiny and cut into neat crescent moons.

 

“The bastard’s probably still out there.”

 

Once again, Kei’s suspicions that Oikawa is a telepathic alien from Mars are confirmed. “Yeah,” he agrees.

 

“Last I saw of him, he was in the ruins of the Archimedes’ desert, chasing after ghosts.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“There _are_ ghosts in Archimedes, y’know.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Oikawa sighs, his carefully careless hair flopping down as the rest of his body deflates a little. He straightens up after that, and lifts his gaze to Kei’s face.

 

“What do you need from me, you scary-looking child.”

 

Behind the counter, Hinata and Kageyama hurl insults at each other like projectiles. Someone’s phone goes off, the familiar-annoying sound ricocheting off the warm red walls of the coffee shop. Kei thinks about Oikawa, seven years old, tittering through gap-toothed teeth. _Don’t come crying to me then._

 

He says, “I need you to tell me how to find him. Please.”

 

☉

 

When Kuroo used to come back from missions with bruises the size of fists under his clothes, Oikawa would, too. Not all the time, but often enough for them to become recognizable together in their frayed shirtsleeves and brilliant, tattered smiles. Both of them eighteen, one with an extra year of experience under his peeling leather belt. Both of them earthquakes.

 

This is how the friendship between Kuroo and Oikawa started. In flames, in fortune, in fury funneled into foraging. This is how it has gone on, and grown, and lost some raw, roaring firepower. Gained some faith.

 

Oikawa’s sat at the bottom of at least five different ravines with Kuroo now, so Kei isn’t surprised when he rattles off the names of every realm Kuroo has visited in the recent months, and does it smoothly. Oikawa does everything smoothly and to the best of his ability when it matters. It’s just how he is.

 

Instead, Kei takes down notes on his phone. There’s the Archimedes’ desert ruins, and the two-moon realm, which he’s heard of, which he already knows about. Then there are others, strange, unfamiliar names like Renyuguo and Hakoguni and Upside Down. Kei notes all of them down. Asks Oikawa how to spell their names when he isn’t sure, because it might be important. Studies the photographs on the wall as Oikawa finishes, his stream-of-consciousness sentences effortlessly transitioning into airy commentary on the weather.

 

“Winter’s ending, which means the flowers will start to bloom again soon. And that’s cool and all, rainbows and sunshine for everyone, but be careful, Tsukishima. I don’t know what you’re planning, but be careful.”

 

Kei is grateful for a lot of people these days.

 

☉

 

When Kei is eight, he almost drowns.

 

The local community pool is shallow on one end and slopes gently downwards from there out, until even his father’s gigantic giraffe head cannot be seen above water when he plants his feet at the bottom. This uncertainty has never bothered Kei; he loves swimming. He’s good at it.

 

So it seems strange, like a glitch in the fabric of reality that Tsukishima Kei, who can swim butterfly and grab 100 yen coins from the bottom of a three-meter-deep pool, would be here, in these shoes, wearing this skin. This terrified skin.

 

But picture the scene anyway: Saturday morning, sunlight falling in clear sheets across everything, highlighting every ripple that skims the water’s surface. The neat, red-rimmed rectangle of the pool filled out with toddlers screaming about existentialism and parents screaming after them, kids carrying huge rubber floats, lone swimmers trying to do laps like they’re in the middle of an obstacle course. Kei, sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the pool, eyes wide open.

 

And here is how it goes wrong, so picture this too, the sudden jolt of panic that courses through him like electricity, like a cold front, except it’s the middle of summer, which Kei hates the most, and they’re at the pool, so it should be all right.

 

It isn’t all right. Kei is _scaredscaredscared_ of nothing at all. He’s in a crowded city square and too short to be seen in the crowd and he can’t see his parents anywhere. He’s in a swimming pool, which he’s supposed to love, and he can’t move his arms or legs or head, and he cannot breathe. He needs to get out of the water. He needs to get out of the water.

 

But there’s a song in his head, piano-soft and striking and it’s cutting him up inside too now, so Kei doesn’t feel human anymore. In this moment he is suspended in mid-water, mid-air, mid-life. Both here and not here. Real, and a strange green light in the distance.

 

He can’t breathe.

 

Every atom in his body is screaming like a parent screaming at their screaming toddler, like his body is trying to leave him and go somewhere else, but Kei doesn’t want to leave. Kei wants to live, Kei can’t move any part of himself now, Kei cannot breathe.

 

Fear, so sharp and real in the moment that it doesn’t feel like it’s his. It doesn’t feel like he has the right to own something so viscerally painful, to call it his own. Fear, panic, _I’mscaredwhat’shappeningsomeonehelpme_. _Someone help me._

 

And then darkness. His vision going blurry, shadows creeping in around the blue, all hungry and hollowed out like midnight.

 

And then a song.

 

Kei doesn’t close his eyes or move his lips or kick his legs— he just disappears. Good-bye mind, good-bye me. Later, let’s meet again later. Good-bye, swimming pool.

 

Below it all, trembling, a song.

 

☉

 

Kei gets ready to leave on Tuesday. It’s an unholy day, dreary and downtrodden; perfect for his departure.

 

The great thing about being the son of two high-ranking scientists in POOLS is that you grow up in home base, tottering down hallways papered with maps and diagrams, asking for help with fifth grade history assignments from people who’ve spent their lives studying the entire chronologies of other realms. The great thing about hanging around home base so much is you end up knowing as much about the nature of diving as an actual diver.

 

Kei is fairly confident in this respect. He took the theory test three years ago because he was bored and Kuroo teased him and said he wouldn’t be able to pass. _No way, not without a single shred of formal diving education. Not even if it's you, Tsukki._

 

Naturally, he had passed it, and Kuroo had smiled at the news. Not his usual cheshire grin but a smile rendered in softer lights, the corners of his eyes crinkling with what looked like genuine happiness. Or pride, or excitement, or wonder. _I knew you could do it._ Whatever.

 

Kei’s never actually dived in his life, but somehow it's all right. He passed the theory test three years ago. Kuroo Tetsurou is his best friend. He's heard every single diving-related horror story in history, thanks to his parents’ doting, morbid colleagues, and Hinata. And Oikawa.

 

He gets approached by about half of the fortieth floor’s inhabitants and more in the morning. Yachi offers homemade cookies and her company on the first leg of the trip. Bokuto offers a can of Oikawa’s Arizona green tea. Oikawa offers blessings from his soul, and Bokuto’s ass on a plate so Kei will not be lonely and Bokuto will stop stealing his stuff from the fridge.

 

Hinata offers him a hug. Sawamura offers him company on the whole trip, dungeons and moon dimensions and all. Yamaguchi offers him a smile, small and slight and tight with worry underneath his warm freckled face, but genuine all the same.

 

“I hope you find what you're looking for,” he says, and means it.

 

Kei turns everything down except for the cookies, and Yamaguchi.

 

So he’s never dived in his life, but no one’s worried, and his parents don’t know yet, and he told Sawamura he was just going to comb through charted territory again in case they missed something (Kei doesn’t think they did), so they let him go. Riff divers do this every day— slip in and out of dimensions lugging temperature-loggers and other clunky mapping fare with them, putting names and numbers to the familiar and the known. It’s the coda divers, pressing forward into uncharted waters with these hungry, too-bright eyes, that you have to be worried about.

 

Kei is only sort of worried, like having an itch you can’t quite reach. But he can’t reach it no matter how hard he tries, so he lies to Sawamura and lets him pull him into a hug, and then sits on the edge of the diamond pool on the fortieth floor with a waterproof backpack slung over his shoulders. He looks through his trip itinerary. Not the one he showed curious, exuberant Hinata or disgruntled but equally curious Kageyama, but the other one. The one that would get him yanked out of this windowless swimming pool room without a second’s hesitation.

 

He clenches his fist around the whistle in his hand, feeling the smooth metal curve of the barrel, the chips and dents. _An anchor is important, Kei. It’s what keeps you connected to your original world, so it has to be something that means a lot to you, and you have to hold onto it no matter what. You can’t dive without it. You can’t go anywhere without it._

 

The memory rises from the depths of him.

 

 _If you blow this I’ll come running from anywhere in the world, I promise._ Kuroo, all of thirteen years old and cut clumsily from the kind of precious metal you could stare at for hours.

 

Kuroo, in the middle of the fucking ocean, the indigo-colored one that smells like lavender, saying _I’m sorry you don’t understand, I’m sorry. I can’t make you._

 

The whistle has a hole at the top and a solid woven cord threaded through it. Kei’s looped it around his wrist twice, but he loosens that now, hangs it around his neck instead. Tucks it underneath his shirt, sticky with cold sweat.

 

Kei’s not a fan of swimming pools anymore, and hasn’t been into one in maybe five years.

 

At least the diamond pool is shallow, barely a meter-and-a-half deep. Kei is much, much taller than that. He tries to tell himself this. He almost succeeds.

 

The main problem is, Kei still remembers the sensation of almost-drowning, of his lungs collapsing under the weight of the moon. The other problem is Kuroo. He’s not afraid of either one. He swears it. He’s not afraid.

 

So the smaller problem is getting to wherever in high hell Kuroo is, and if there’s one thing Kei is good at, it’s seeing something through to the end. A history assignment, a boring book, a theory test on the mechanics of diving. A journey, of the life-changing variety.

 

He sucks in a deep, faltering breath. He can do this. The water here is summery-warm because of the temperature regulation systems installed underneath the tiled floor. There is no Antarctica to be found here.

 

The ceiling shrinks away from him as he pictures Archimedes the way Kuroo described it, the sloping sand dunes, the dry, hot air, the name, the name.

 

It’s a downtrodden, dreary Tuesday when Kei leaves Tokyo for the first time in his life.

 

It’s perfect.

 

☉

 

 _“Hey, Tsukki, did you know? The word ‘planet’ comes from the Greek word_ planetes _, which means wanderer._

 

_Think about that, all the planets drifting across the universe, never stopping anywhere, never settling down. Sounds kind of lonely, doesn't it._

 

_I hope they found what they were looking for. I hope they found a way home.”_

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can @ me. i'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs)
> 
> after aperture i decided i was high as fuck and so the next day i immediately began a new thing. the thing was single-handedly inspired by the quote at the beginning, which is from age of iron by J.M. Coetzee (one of my a level exam lit texts, incidentally)  
> i've got chapters 2 and 3 written already but i don't know how bad school's gonna be from here on out so the current plan is to drop a chapter a week, every thursday, GMT+8 or so. you can look forward to that.  
> for the record, i've never tried and succeeded at writing something with a) multiple chapters and b) an actual plot. if things seem a little iffy, please forgive me. if you're still confused about what the hell diving is, the short explanation is it's a variation on dimension travel. the long explanation is in chapter 2  
> if you enjoyed this, please consider leaving a kudo or a comment, or not. whatever floats your boat, flaps your jack, kicks your dick. i'm just chillin
> 
> have a good one


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kuroo goes very, very still, like he’s part of the whole stage setup, grand piano and cushioned chair and pretty boy with the apocalyptic smile. All of fifteen years young.
> 
> Then his eyes find Kei’s, and he relaxes, just a little.
> 
> “Hey Tsukki,” Kuroo says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. i fucked up in the last chapter, kei was eight (8) during the Swimming Pool Incident. fixed. also sorry  
> 2\. made spotify playlists. here's [tsukishima's](https://open.spotify.com/user/11186251434/playlist/7hF1cCUZNuZ5f1W26kZPTx?si=TZ5k_lW-RCmfBmOWHIj_jA) and here's [kuroo's](https://open.spotify.com/user/11186251434/playlist/6rya6rXplE9nKGrALECbFd?si=BBhhD0WWRDO6voXqKOC3mA)
> 
> enjoy

_“...I guess it’s a pretty word. If nothing else.”_

 

_“Pretty like you?”_

 

_“Shut up, Kuroo."_

 

_“I mean it.”_

 

 _“Like you meant it when you tried to convince me that_ konbini _cashiers were all robots. I’m very convinced.”_

 

_“But Tsukki—”_

 

_“Good night.”_

  


☉

  


Kei’s middle school has a grand piano.

 

Usually it rests in the second music room, heavy and swollen as students flit in and out, feathering their hands up and down the keys, throwing volleys of sound out the open window. Sometimes it gets moved out to the space behind the auditorium when there are performances to be had, propped up like a ghost behind the thick red curtains.

 

Kei’s only ever seen it used in music class for things like scales and chord progressions. He’s never cared to stick around and watch the music elective kids play. To him, it’s just that. A piano. He’s in his first year of middle school and Kuroo is graduating at the end of it, and National Geographic is airing a feature on the brachiosaurus tonight. There are other things in life to waste your time fretting over.

 

Kuroo is graduating even though Kei only started seeing his face again on dreary Monday mornings last month. This bothers Kei more than it should.

 

Anyway, as one of many rules he generally sticks to, Kei doesn’t go into the second music room, or any of the music rooms, of his own volition. But today is Friday and he’s not hoping to bump into Kuroo at all when he spends the pocket of time after class wandering the discarded hallways, white headphones on and annoying people-sounds shut out. He is absolutely not hoping for anything.

 

His feet take him to the aesthetics block, furthest from the front gate and steeped in dense, man-made forest that leans into the windows and landings like it wants to crawl right in. He winds up outside the music rooms. His red Converse sneakers squeak as he shuffles down the smooth, polished floor.

 

The odds of Kuroo being here are next to none; he’s not a music student, _Kei’s_ not a music student, it’s six in the evening. Kei is good at being logical, less so at reasoning with himself using that same foolproof logic.

 

He’s mid-heel-turn when a strange sound interrupts the silence. Kei’s headphones are pretty tough on the noise-cancelling front, but the sound is stubborn, soft, invasive. He turns around, notes the half-open door of the second music room.

 

Tugging his headphones off, Kei creeps forward until he’s standing right by the door, peeking inside.

 

Kuroo’s not a music student, as far as Kei is aware. He’s always been brash and bright and sly and everything in between, jack of all trades and master of it all on top of that. He’s gone from skateboarding to parkour to poetry, and Kei’s been wordlessly impressed by all of it; he’s never touched music.

 

Yet here he stands in the middle of the room, awkwardly bent over the little cushioned bench he’s not sitting on, the tacky red bomber hanging off the jut of his shoulders. Glowing like a Renaissance painting, soft with sunset. His fingers dance a slow waltz across the keys, hesitating, but his hands— they aren’t awkward at all.

 

Kuroo’s not a music student, so Kei has no idea how he’s doing it. His movements aren’t skipping-stone-fast the way Mr. Teh the music teacher’s are. They’re weighted, worn, like every key he hits is being pulled from the bottom of a swimming pool, emerging heavy and swollen and strange. Kuroo plays like a time lag.

 

But the song in his hands is as clear as a cloudless summer sky. He plays with nine fingers, one trailing behind like an aftermath, and the tune that rises up into the blurry light barges into Kei’s chest, settles in the space between his lungs like it belongs there. It’s bizarre, bizarrely familiar and bizarrely painful. It makes him want to cry.

 

He doesn’t realize he’s made a sound until Kuroo stops playing. Kuroo goes very, very still, like he’s part of the whole stage setup, grand piano and cushioned chair and pretty boy with the apocalyptic smile. All of fifteen years young.

 

Then his eyes find Kei’s, and he relaxes, just a little.

 

“Hey Tsukki,” Kuroo says, his voice rough like he hasn’t used it in a while. He makes a gesture like _come here._ Kei tips forward into the room like an upended glass.

 

Kei can’t stop thinking about the piano and Kuroo’s hands, and Kuroo’s hands. His hands. “That song,” he asks, looking up at Kuroo because he’s thirteen right now, and shorter than him. “What’s it called?”

 

Kuroo’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly in surprise, before he catches himself and a smile splatters itself across his face like a gorgeous accident. “I dunno. I just happened to remember it. Probably heard it on the radio or something.” His voice is nonchalant. Aloof.

 

“I didn’t know you could play the piano,” Kei presses.

 

Kuroo shrugs. “I didn’t know either.”

 

“How can you just not know.”

 

“Maybe I picked it up while I was drifting around all over the place.”

 

The sun is going away. The feeling in Kei’s chest is starting to go away, too. He panics.

 

“Can you play it again?”

 

For a split-second there is nothing in Kei’s vision except Kuroo, the piano, and an old, sad song. The room goes dark. Kuroo gives him a funny look.

 

“Sure,” he replies, and there’s something in his voice now, beyond the roughness and the weightlessness, something Kei can’t quite put a name to. “Sure.”

  


☉

  


_POOLS Diver’s Theory Test_

_August 5th, 2015_

 

_Candidate name: Tsukishima Kei_

 

_Question 1:_

_Name the key differences between coda diving and riff diving._

 

_Question 2:_

_What are some of the dangers associated with uncharted waters?_

 

_Question 3:_

_Why do you keep lying to yourself about your feelings?_

  


☉

  


The other thing about being the son of two high-ranking scientists in POOLS is that you grow up at home base, and because of that, everyone knows who you are. When the adults catch a stray kid in the mirror realm, trying to steal their quills and calculators so he can sell them to the locals, they don’t send him to the quarantine room. They send him to Kei.

 

Actually, they do send him to the quarantine room, but that comes later, when they’ve managed to wrangle some kind of background out of the cracks in his tough, rubbery smile. First of all, they send him to Kei.

 

Kuroo Tetsurou, as he identifies himself, is a mystery.

 

Kei is ten years old, and terrified of swimming pools, and he knows a bit about diving now. He knows about the organization his parents work for (POOLS, just pools, the capital letters an over-dramatic acronym for nothing at all), and he knows about other worlds, and he knows dinosaurs exist in some of them. Getting to these places is simple— the Flow is connected to every body of water in the world, no matter how large or small or insignificant. All you have to do is hold your breath and dive.

 

What Kei also knows is that diving is dangerous. If you lose the favor of the Flow you’ll never make it home. If you lose your anchor you’ll never make it home. That’s why POOLS exists at all, in all its overzealous and glitzy glory, a necessity so that people don’t go missing, so people don’t disappear. A glittering glass skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo. A lighthouse.

 

Not being able to go home is a terrifying thought, one too big and scary for Kei to comprehend. Like the boogeyman from a bedtime story. A Halloween story.

 

Kuroo is too much for Kei to comprehend. He’s only two years older than Kei but there is something cold in his eyes, like he has never been a child before, like he has never played with dinosaur figurines on a playmat made from puzzle pieces. _He’s two years older than you._ Kei does the math. Twelve, he reasons, is not a very long time to have lived.

 

The adults whisper behind their backs, and Kei catches snippets of their conversation like highlights on a film reel. He pieces together a story, fantastical and strange and unreal. Kuroo Tetsurou, who came from the stars, who has been diving in and out of realms like an astronaut since he was ten, who doesn’t remember where he came from. Kuroo, who owns nothing except the clothes on his back and two years’ worth of memories. Kuroo, with bird’s nest hair and eyes like melted butter, wearing a smile like people in horror movies hold knives. A mystery.

 

Kei offers him the dinosaur figurine in his hand. It’s a brachiosaurus, bright turquoise, and his favorite.

 

Kuroo just keeps smiling, like it’s all he has, like it’s all he knows how to do.

  


☉

  


Archimedes is both exactly how Kuroo once described it to be, and nothing at all like it. But Kuroo has always had a flair for dramatics, so Kei understands.

 

His first diving experience could, hypothetically, be likened to riding a mind-numbing roller coaster through a tornado and a tsunami at the same time, but even that analogy falls short somehow. The mind-numbing part is accurate— it takes him a full minute, splayed out on the sand beside a small oasis of water, to reconnect the dots in his head, to remember what in satan’s flaming asshole he’s doing here; the rest of it pales in comparison. Diving is more like riding a roller coaster without a seatbelt. In other words: like free falling.

 

After the minute of intense confusion has passed and his face starts to burn from the sheer heat, the water droplets sizzling and evaporating off his skin and clothes like they can’t wait to leave, Kei sits up. The sand falls away from his arms and shirt, the curve of his elbows. He groans.

 

So he didn’t bring sunscreen, because nobody brings that kind of shit with them across realms, but he does have an umbrella. Kei shakes it open, holds it over his head like a ward.

 

Kuroo has mentioned Archimedes in passing before. He used to talk about the endless, endless expanses of sand dotted only here and there with small pockets of life, trying to capture the entire canopy of the peacock blue sky in his words. Kei would watch with careful passiveness as Kuroo ricocheted off all the walls in the room, his pianist’s hands stretched out wide, palms bared and laid flat for the world to alight on them. Archimedes, the realm of sand and ghosts and ruins.

 

How do you find a missing person? How do you even start? Kei wishes there was a manual for this kind of thing, the way there are about five different editions of textbooks for high school biology. He wants a manual for playing hide and seek.

 

Because Kuroo loves hide and seek, and tic tac toe, Kuroo loves games. The competitiveness, the tight-lipped-cross-eyed-sweat-slick pressure of them, the way his old self slips out sometimes and no one cares. Kei had an epiphany about a week ago, lying in bed with the UFO-print blankets spread out like a map beneath him.

 

If this is hide and seek then Kuroo probably doesn’t want to be found, which means he will do everything and anything to make sure of that. Kuroo is a contortionist, a gymnast, a circus act on a tightrope. Kuroo is a mystery.

 

But Kei knows more about him than anyone else in any world, so he sighs, squints into the distance, and starts walking.

  


☉

  


Archimedes is really, really fucking hot. Kei was aware of this when he first landed in a pool of water, but now there is no more pool and no more water, and the latex straps of his waterproof backpack are digging into his shoulder, and it’s _really fucking hot._ Has he said that yet? He needs to say it again. It’s hot.

 

Archimedes is also completely and entirely devoid of intelligent life. This much, Kei remembers from Kuroo’s spiels. The charted territory extends in a twenty-kilometer radius from the entry point. Beyond that, only Kuroo and the rest know about.

 

When Sawamura hugged him and told him to come back soon, he had done so under the impression that Kei had planned a three day two night trip to the Bahamas. By the Bahamas, Kei means maybe two or three realms, safety-zones, six kilometer hikes from one end of the plastic shopping mall to the other. By two or three realms, Kei means he’s eighteen, and cruel, and he told another lie. He’ll be sorry later.

 

The apologies can come after he finds Kuroo, who will not be found anywhere near charted territory. So Kei plans a bigger, grander trip. A journey, of the life-changing variety. So Kei resolves to brave these dangers, and he’ll do it for— He’ll do it for—

 

_Why do you keep lying to yourself?_

 

He’ll do it for Kuroo, his friend, all of six foot two and soft, scarred skin, but only because no one else will do it in his stead. Only because he has to.

  


☉

  


One foot in front of the other, repeating in an endless cycle. Like clockwork. Like sun-spikes, like pinwheels, like, like.

 

Like dying. Kei feels like dying. It’s been five hours, the watch on his wrist informs him, five hours of trundling through the sand dunes in a mostly-straight but sort of wobbly line. His vision is full of blue and yellow and blue and yellow and nothing else, nothing else at all. He can’t feel his face.

 

Everything looks sort of the same, the only noticeable differences being slightly larger hills and slightly steeper inclines, moments in which Kei has to pause with visible effort so he can slippery-slide his way down the ever-shifting sand dunes. The peacock blue of the sky laughs at him and his delicate, pale skin. The sand is sand. He hates all of it.

 

There is no sun in Archimedes. Or, at least, not one visible to the naked eye. Kei doesn’t have naked eyes, not technically, he has glasses with sturdy black frames which serve him just fine, except they keep falling down the bridge of his nose, and he keeps having to push them up, and the extra effort is slowly depriving him of his will to continue. He can’t see the fucking sun with them on anyway. There isn’t a sun in Archimedes. Just the heat, and the desert, and the ghosts.

 

The ghosts are the other defining factor of Archimedes. Depending on who you are, they are either massively attractive, or a massive deterrent towards so much as stepping foot here. Kuroo has always been fascinated by them, Yamaguchi slightly horrified, Oikawa convinced they are actually sentient alien beings from beyond the boundaries of the sun-free sky.

 

Depending on the time of the day, Kei either dislikes them or dislikes them. The time, his watch reads, is six thirty-four in the evening in useless, faraway, wintry Tokyo. Kei dislikes them. Nothing else to it.

 

As he trudges further and further away from holy salvation at the entry point, more and more ghosts appear. They’re transparent with wobbly, watery edges, sort of like a ziplock bag, but less solid. There’s something off about the way everything looks through the center, but you can’t pinpoint the problem until you let your eyes wander to the sealed edges and then beyond that. There’s something weird about the way the horizon gets distorted when Kei tries to peer through their ash-gray bodies, scrunching his face up in concentration.

 

The ghosts themselves don’t have faces either. In fact, they’re barely humanoid, with what vaguely resembles four limbs and a pronounced protrusion near the top that could probably be called a head. But they’re human-sized, and there’s an opening somewhere on that head protrusion. The opening contorts from time to time, mimicking the movement of lungs, of air billowing in and out.

  
Kei’s pretty sure they’re harmless, but it’s alarming nonetheless to see what starts out as two or three positioned like commuters at a bus stop every twelve meters or so, turn into a college party of nameless, shapeless specters crowding in on and around him.

 

He’s in the middle of a desert, for fuck’s sake, but Kei’s starting to feel suffocated.

 

The tracker in his pocket lets out a cheerful beep after about what feels like three centuries, alerting him to the fact that he’s on the edge of Archimedes’ charted territory. His watch says it’s almost ten, but night doesn’t fall here. It doesn’t matter in the greater scheme of things. Kei’s just tired.

 

Either the ghosts have started following him, a clump of spirit-matter trailing after him much like the train of a wedding gown, or Kei is hallucinating. He does the math. Both options are bad. Everything is bad.

 

He looks up at the stupid, perennially blue sky. Ten o’clock, Tokyo time. Kuroo Tetsurou, nowhere in sight.

 

Shrugging his backpack off his shoulders, he lays out his sleeping bag on top of himself, and then sticks the umbrella handle in the sand on top of that.

 

He’ll worry about things tomorrow. Tomorrow.

  


☉

  


_Candidate name: Tsukishima Kei_

 

_Question 1:_

_Riff divers map already discovered territory and attempt to identify elements of the land consistent with other realms. Coda divers only have one job, and that is to go beyond charted territory, to uncharted waters, and find out what lies there._

 

_Question 2:_

_The further out one goes from the entry point, the more unpredictable the environment becomes. For example, seemingly harmless flowers may begin to diffuse poisonous gases, as is the case with the Burge realm. Coda divers must be alert at all times to the slightest change in their surroundings so as to avoid sustaining excessive damage._

 

_Question 3:_

_I don’t have feelings for anyone._

  


☉

  


He has a dream, and then forgets all about it.

 

In this dream Kuroo’s leaning over him in his high school uniform, the striped tie around his neck resting against Kei’s chest. He smells like sweet osmanthus and winter and hair gel. It’s a familiar smell.

 

In this dream they’re in a train carriage. Kei’s back is against the door and Kuroo has his hands on either side of his neck, pretty hands looking strong enough to hurt, looking hurt enough to take apart. Kei is the taller of the two, but Kuroo’s presence is larger than life, like he could swallow Kei right up if he tried to. Kei wouldn’t mind. Kei would probably let him.

 

The train lurches and Kei’s knees buckle. He slides further down the door-face and has to tilt his face up to look Kuroo in the eye. To look at those melted butter eyes.

 

 _You know I had to go,_ Kuroo’s saying, sounding sad and serious and not at all like a high schooler. He isn’t a high schooler anymore. Kei has no idea what they’re doing on this train in their too-tight uniforms, the air between them hot enough that it could start a fire.

 

Kuroo’s eyes are less heavily-lidded than usual, like he’s trying to see as much of Kei as he can. His gaze roves over Kei’s forehead, eyes, nose, stutters like a comma on his lips, travels downwards. There’s barely a breath of space between them.

 

 _No, I don’t._ Kei finds his hands where they’ve almost fallen off and brings them up to Kuroo’s collar, tightens his fingers around Kuroo’s ugly striped tie.

 

 _Tsukki, please._ Kuroo’s voice sounds like a knife-wound. That’s rare for him, newsworthy, story-strange. Kuroo’s voice never sounds this raw, this broken. Kuroo never lets this much skin show.

 

_Tsukki, please._

 

But it’s too late, because Kei’s hands are turning to stone around Kuroo’s tie, and it’s getting late, so he pushes Kuroo away from him. The train door vanishes and Kei’s falling, falling, falling down, Kuroo’s voice chasing after him from the top of a mountain, from the bottom of the mountain. All the dead things. Kuroo’s voice, raw, red, broken.

 

Kei has a dream, but he forgets all about it.

  


☉

  


Kei wakes up to a muddled, bruise-blue sky. He lurches forward with the shock of it, forgetting for a moment everything about his present reality, watching the overlapping shadows of ghosts around him with bewildered, frantic eyes.

 

It comes back to him in bits and pieces. The swimming pool, the desert, the game of hide and seek.

 

To his pleasant surprise, his skin is slightly less charred than he’d expected it to be. He packs up quickly and efficiently, slings his backpack over his shoulder, looks out in the direction of the unknown. Silently, he thanks the tech team back at home base for the auto-adjusting compass he takes a look at for reference, and the tracker. He eats two energy bars, shortcake flavored, and chugs his fifth (sixth? Seventh? To infinity and beyond, and fuck it all.) bottle of mineral water.

 

Kei looks out in the direction of the unknown again. This is as far as the last coda divers had gone; he’s confident that Kuroo has traveled much, much further beyond that.

 

The moment Kei crosses the boundary between known and unknown is a physical one. He feels the impact of it hit him like a meteor to the side of his planet-self, the rush of adrenalin in his blood and the sharp thrill of danger.

 

Kei breaks out into a slow jog, anticipation lighting his nerves on fire. He’s waiting for— something. Anything. A sudden spring shower from home, or a sign from Kuroo, or an accident. A gorgeous accident.

 

The majestic ruins of Archimedes rise up out of the seamless horizon in a gradual incline, spreading crumbling wings across the blue sky of the desert. Distantly Kei recalls Kuroo telling him about this, too, how he’d been talking to Kenma and they’d theorized together that all the ghosts had actually once been the inhabitants of those abandoned places. Imagine that. The disaster, the sheer horror, the life deflating from their lungs like air leaving a punctured balloon. The tragedy of it all.

 

For better or worse, he doesn’t make it to the monumental land of ruins. About half a kilometer past the boundary, his eyes catch on something distinctly not-yellow and not-blue, sitting innocuously in the sand. Kei is there in a flash, crouched over on the ground, sweat pouring down his face. It’s a red card, of the flaky convenience store kind.

 

 _Congratulations on the marriage!_ The cover writes.

 

He rolls his eyes, flips it open. The morning rush hour throng of ghosts surrounds him, their empty faces straining to see, too. Curious, even from beyond the void of nothingness.

 

_If you’re reading this, then you’re too late. But I was expecting that, so it’s all right!_

 

_Catch you in the next world, Tsukki._

 

There’s a clumsy drawing of a cat at the bottom to match the clumsy handwriting above. Black fur, black nose, one eye squeezed shut.

 

_Tsukki._

 

Kei holds the card in his fist like a good luck charm the whole way back to the entry point, the ghosts whistling a string of nursery rhymes in his wake.

  


☉

  


Kuroo doesn’t take his first year of high school very well. Kei can tell.

 

He smiles like a charm through lazy, half-lidded eyes and slouches from one end of neon-lit Tokyo to the other, so everyone thinks he’s doing just fine. But Kei knows better. Kei is fourteen and middle school has taught him some things about reading stilted silences and forced laughter, and Kei has known Kuroo for four years now, so he knows better.

 

It’s not particularly alarming at first. Kuroo has always been temperamental, even if he hides it well. Kei lets him stare holes into the Jurassic Park posters on his bedroom wall on weekday afternoons, when Kuroo doesn’t feel like doing his homework and Kei feels like watching him, and the wall doesn’t quite melt. Kei figures he’ll be fine eventually.

 

Eventually turns into a mantra, of sorts. Kuroo turns into a mantra.

 

It’s barely worth commenting on when it starts, the occasional smattering of fingertips on the floor, a peal of percussion against the table. Kuroo looks bored, relaxed, carefree like a cat curled up on the highest branch of a gingko tree. But his hands. But his hands.

 

It gets worse as the months bleed into each other, and Kuroo begins to talk less and less about how much he likes his philosophy teacher and volleyball, or the suspicious coverage of the principal’s hair on his head, which suggests that he might actually be wearing a wig. Kuroo drifts. There’s a restless energy to him, a kind of unhappiness, maybe, but Kei thinks he’s not quite there yet. Kei won’t call it unhappiness, not now.

 

There’s something wrong, anyway.

 

It’s a warm, muggy Saturday afternoon when Kei finally summons what's left of his mental strength and willpower and asks, “Are you okay?”

 

He says this very, very quietly, like it’s barely a question, mostly a statement of fact. Kuroo is never not okay. Kuroo is annoying and laid back and quotes Kant far too often to be considered sane, but he is never not okay.

 

Kuroo drums his fingers against the carpet. “‘Course I am,” he replies, half-incredulous, half-kind.

 

Kei believes him.

  


☉

  


His trip to the Bahamas should be half over by now, but Kei has other plans. Kei has a stupid wedding celebration card with Kuroo’s stupid crooked chicken scrawl on it, and enough energy bars to last him through at least three more deserts, and his heart. Kei has his heart, which is a fragile, fleeting thing.

 

He still doesn’t quite know what to do with it, but for now his legs carry him forward, and that’s enough. That’s enough for him.

  


☉

  


At the third years’ middle school graduation ceremony, they bring out the grand piano.

 

Kuroo stands on the small, narrow stage with the rest of his class in full uniform, hands folded behind his back and the cuffs of his pants falling neatly over polished shoes. He looks sort of out of place with his hair violently subdued by industrial-strength hair gel, his signature catlike grin tamed into a poster-perfect smile for the camera, but he looks sort of good, too. Kei can’t decide how he feels about the change. This is the Kuroo of the day, very majestic, very young. Good enough for Kei to want to steal away and hide in his dinosaur figurine collection, so no one else can get their hands on him. Good enough to want.

 

Kei doesn’t tell him any of these things, naturally. He pushes them to the back of his mind alongside the clutter of mathematical formulae and literary metaphors, and when Kuroo makes a beeline for him after the ceremony Kei’s face is reassuringly full of nothing at all.

 

Kuroo takes his congratulations with poise and grace and a sleek smile to match. Kei pretends he isn’t enraptured, like he hasn’t been somewhere between falling and hitting the ground for the last three years. Alice in Wonderland, and the stupid cheshire cat. Kei pretends.

 

Later on, when they walk past the grand piano at the back of the hall, Kei points at it.

 

“I’m surprised you’re not gonna play something.”

 

A beat of silence. A monumental kind of nothingness, like the world is getting sucked out through the back door.

 

Kuroo’s expression is blank when he turns to him.

 

“What’re you talking about, Tsukki? I don’t play the piano.”

  


☉

  


The second music room has been empty for a long, long time. Kei knows. He’s been there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) | [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> everything was going so Well until our teachers announced consecutive literature and history essay tests next week. haha. bye bitch i'm outta here.  
> anyway chapter 2! here it is. from this point on i'm going to be jumping between the present and various events in kei's memories- as much as i can i've tried to mark flashbacks with characters' ages and years to ease the confusion, so i hope you'll hang tight. many types of shit will be hitting the fan in the future. it will be exciting, i hope (?). please come yell at me on twitter if you'd like. i am on twitter a lot
> 
> if you liked this shit you can leave a kudo or a comment or anyth, they are my lifeblood. or you may not; whatever floats your boat, flaps your jack, kicks your dick.
> 
> have a good one


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No wonder he smiles like that. No wonder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this week's recommended listening is [tsukishima's playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/11186251434/playlist/7hF1cCUZNuZ5f1W26kZPTx?si=TZ5k_lW-RCmfBmOWHIj_jA)

Kuroo has a voice like an old, sad song on the radio, and it confuses the living hell out of Kei, who is ten this year, and likes dinosaurs, and doesn’t know how to deal with his feelings yet. Kuroo’s voice reminds him of drowning. He never wants to hear it ever again and he wants to listen to it forever.

 

Kuroo is also twelve, and tucked neatly into the lounge on the top floor of POOLS’ home base, where they keep all the crumbly apple pies and strawberry shortcakes stuffed with sweet cream, hidden from sight. The room smells different, not like the usual citrusy air freshener that gets sprayed everywhere. Kuroo sits, perfectly still, on the dark leather armchair, not moving, barely breathing. Like there's something inside of him that he’s holding onto with a leash, like it'll come snarling right out of him if he’s not careful. His left hand is swollen with bandages.

 

He doesn’t take the turquoise brachiosaurus figurine that Kei sticks out towards him, so Kei’s a little bit offended. It’s his favorite, after all.

 

“Your name’s Kuroo,” Kei says, bringing the figurine back to rest in his lap.

 

Kuroo tilts his head to the side quizzically. “Did I ever say it was?” A predatory grin snaps into place like a rubber band, lightning quick.

 

“Yeah, you did,” Kei insists, slightly more annoyed now. “I heard it from Ukai.”

 

Kuroo blinks slowly.

 

“Okay then.”

 

Kei narrows his eyes. “So, I'm right?”

 

This startles a hiccup of laughter out of Kuroo, scratchy-strange like he's not used to making sounds quite this bright. “Sure,” he concedes.

 

Kei leans back in his own armchair, letting the creased leather swallow him up. He nods, satisfied.

 

He gets distracted for a second thinking about the rerun of The Land Before Time on TV tonight, and when his attention trickles back towards the boy on the other side of the polished coffee table, Kuroo is still staring at him. He looks like he's been staring at Kei this whole time; his eyes are guarded behind heavy eyelids, his expression unnaturally calm like the deathly-still surface of a lake.

 

“Where are you from?” Kei asks, just to fill up the space, which suddenly seems to be ballooning all around him in this too-cold, too-clean room. He's seen bits and pieces of crime investigation shows before, and therefore knows how these things go. Who-what-when-where-how; why. Kuroo confuses the living hell out of Kei, so he's going to unpack his mystery, give it a shape.

 

But Kuroo shrugs in response. “Dunno, don't really care.” It's not mean per se, but it's dismissive— of both Kei’s question and himself, like he doesn't think his response matters no matter who it’s for.

 

Kei scowls. “Why are you here then?”

 

“Because they brought me here?”

 

“Why’d they bring you?”

 

“I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, apparently.”

 

“Where were you before that?”

 

“Dunno.”

 

“Is your hand okay?”

 

“Dunno.”

 

“Are you okay?”

 

“Nope.” Kuroo smiles at him again. Latex gloves, latex lips. It’s strange like everything about him has been so far, but his response, the last one, feels like the most honest thing he’s said all day.

 

It makes Kei a little sad. But he doesn’t know how to deal with his feelings yet, so he doesn’t say anything about it.

 

He accepts the strawberry shortcake the adults in scary-looking suits offer to him when they come back, and lets them take Kuroo away.

 

 

☉

 

 

Kei’s never going to get used to diving. Ever.

 

After surviving his second dive, he has acquired a new arsenal of words for describing the experience. Dimensional diving, he decides, feels a lot like getting sucked into a vacuum cleaner. Like when there are cockroaches in the kitchen and nobody is feeling stupidly brave enough to try and catch them, so the babysitter pulls out the vacuum cleaner like a bazooka and fucking _mows_ the little shit over. Kei feels like that cockroach.

 

Kei is also soaking wet, because even if the sensation of diving is like getting your soul sucked right out of your body, the actual medium of transport is still water. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about ponds encrusted with moss, bubbling creeks on mountainsides, or swimming pools— enter through a body of water; exit through another. It’s that simple.

 

So Kei makes his grand debut in the two-moon realm by tumbling, very elegantly, out of a water fountain. Still dizzy from the takeoff and now bruised in several places from landing, he emerges from the shallows like the Loch Ness monster, but grumpier. And grayer. Literally.

 

There is no such thing as color here— it doesn’t matter who you are, what your favorite kind of highlighter is, where you came from. Step onto either moon and you’ll lose every shred of vividness, from the pink in your cheeks to the angry red of the blood flowing through your veins.

 

It’s one of the things Kuroo loves about this place.

 

The last time Kuroo brought up Selenes they were standing in a pool of cold light outside a _konbini,_ watching the moths converge at the point of ignition, the streetlight pulsing like a heartbeat.

 

Kuroo was holding a Styrofoam cup full of hot coffee, and Kei was holding himself back from taking Kuroo’s hand. Kuroo’s coffee was steady in his grip, the rest of him familiarly and reassuringly crooked as always, but his left hand trembled with a quiet kind of fury. Four fingers twisting over and around themselves in never-ending cycles of rebirth; one pinky scarred and curled inwards like an infant.

 

It seemed as if even Kuroo himself wasn’t aware of his own fidgeting. With his hideous bedhead falling into one eye, and the gaudy red bomber jacket glowing gold against the shadows eating into the rest of him, he looked like something from another world. As if he might climb into the night at any moment, leave his Cheshire cat smile behind in the dark blue like a tattoo.

 

“Most people think the two-moon realm’s a fucking nutcase,” he mused then, toeing absentmindedly at the gravel. “But I beg to differ.”

 

Kei had heard him talk about ink-black skies and tent-mazes a million times already. He knew most of Kuroo’s fantastical, fairytale descriptions by heart. But he went on anyway, like he always did. Replied in a low voice, curiosity a weak undercurrent to the kind of affectionate exasperation that was reserved exclusively for these surreal, midnight conversations.

 

“Why?” Kei had asked. Why, why, why—

 

_Do you always have to go?_

 

At that, Kuroo flicked his gaze back to Kei like he was turning on a torch, like a streetlight warding the night off. The melted butter of his eyes, the slant of his mouth. How he was only twenty, forever twenty. His heart still young as a dream. His fingers still trembling.

 

“Because— “

 

 

☉

 

 

When Kei is eight, he almost drowns.

 

When Kuroo is ten. When Kuroo is ten.

 

 

☉

 

 

Kei’s prize for locating the motivation to get up is, predictably enough, another face full of cold water. This comes from a delicate stone statue perched on the top tier of the fountain, the likeness of some dreamy, long-haired goddess carved out of the smooth rock. The statue is holding a vase. The vase is sputtering.

 

The vase is sputtering, so the water gets all over Kei. He may be standing, but he is standing _inside_ the fountain and not outside. There goes the rest of his dignity.

 

When he’s finally gotten to dry land and wiped off his glasses, Kei finds himself in a bustling marketplace.

 

The ground beneath his feet is a shade of gray so pale it might as well be white, pockmarked here and there with craters like wrinkles ironed onto skin. Meanwhile, the path he’s stepped out onto looks like a main street of sorts, canopied shops lining the sides like suitors at a matchmaking session. Each one is firework display-loud, tent-legs pressed shoulder to shoulder, shop owners sticking their heads out from underneath flaps of rippling cloth like roosters at the crack of dawn. Above him, the ink black sky looms.

 

Everyone’s yelling a different name in a different tongue. Kei can barely hear himself think.

 

This bothers him greatly, because he’s trying very hard to think right now. His gaze has switched from the world at large to the statue atop the fountain; Kei glares at the familiar, pretty-lady-face like it’ll tell him what he wants to know if he does it hard enough. He swears he’s seen her before somewhere.

 

The realization hits him barely a second later. Selene, goddess of the moon, wielder of vases with holes in them for dispensing _ass-cold_ water at innocent passers-by.

 

Which means this place is _Selenes_ , fabled land of the moon people. He’s finally remembered its proper name. Kei’s memory hasn’t completely failed him, after all.

 

Armed with a newfound understanding of his surroundings that goes beyond _two-moon realm, perennially at war with itself,_ Kei shakes as much water out of his hair as he can, and wades into the crowd.

 

Armed with one tasteless wedding card, covered in the fingerprints of a ghost, Kei goes on.

 

 

☉

 

 

In typical science stream student fashion, Kei is the sort of meticulous that practically begs to be made fun of. If there’s something he has to do, he needs to plan it out. If he needs to plan it out, he’s got to lay the groundwork. If he’s got to lay the groundwork, then he wants to make blueprints. Kei always has blueprints.

 

Kuroo, who turned up for finals in his third year of high school buzzed on three cans of coffee and two consecutive all-nighters and still managed to ace all his subjects except for Physics, shouldn’t be allowed to say anything. But he does anyway, and frequently, poking and prodding at Kei’s study planners and sticky tabbed notebooks. _Do you really need to try that hard? It’s just high school._

 

_No, it’s not, Kuroo. It’s my future. The one you threw away._

 

Kei keeps his mouth shut, always.

 

Anyway, it’s a good thing Kei makes blueprints, because if he had simply gone traipsing from one end of the street to the other, searching for bird’s nest bedhead and Cheshire cat smiles, he wouldn’t have met the girl. Not that he can help it, the traitorous sliver of hope that works its way into his gut. Not when there are this many people here.

 

Selenes is a people place, after all. Kei lands in a bustling street market, but there are residential areas, and schools, and if Kuroo is right then there is a huge bridge suspended between the two moons like a promise. There’s life.

 

There are also, incidentally, strange, quiet girls, who have apparently seen equally strange and distinctly catlike boys. Boys who look like Kuroo.

 

To be frank, Kei isn’t expecting anything from her. He’s been up and down the street all afternoon approaching strangers and roosters and more strangers to no avail. _Have you seen a guy with really loud hair? It sticks up all over the place and kind of covers one of his eyes. No? That’s all right, thank you very much._

 

Kei has recited the same thing so many times at this point that when he flops down on a crate behind _yet another_ row of tents and sees the strange girl, he doesn’t bother saying it again.

 

“Have you seen a weird guy,” he asks her instead. Short, succinct, and to the point. Absolutely useless, too, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to be all polite and formal even in the shadow of some huge, Martian-looking building. He’s tired. He hates Kuroo. He doesn’t. It’s that simple.

 

The girl, who has pretty black hair that cascades down her shoulders and ridiculously long eyelashes and a beauty spot on the left side of her chin, nods. Kei sighs inwardly. Of course she wouldn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, _he_ doesn’t know what the fuck he’s saying, he’d better get back to the whole business of trying to locate the cause of all his suffering over the past few—

 

The girl nods. Wait.

 

“Wait,” Kei mutters to himself, and then more clearly, “With really shitty hair and a slouch and everything?”

 

Another nod.

 

“Red bomber jacket.”

 

“Yes,” she finally says, instead of nodding.

 

Kei’s heart starts doing vigorous jumping jacks in his chest. An image flashes through his mind— of midnight sidewalks, brittle conversation, crumbling, apocalyptic laughter. _Tsukki, I can explain. I have to go. You understand that, don’t you?_

 

He doesn’t understand anything. “Where is he?”

 

The carefully neutral slant of her expression falters, just for a moment. She hesitates.

 

“Where is he?” Kei repeats.

 

Above them, a one-eyed Martian the size of a rat drops off the side of a brick-walled building. A star winks at him out of the fabric of the beaten-metal sky, seductively far away, seductively out of reach. The residents of Selenes keep on doing what they’ve always been doing, which is being loud and scary so they do not have to think about how much they must hate each other.

 

Her voice, when it finally falls out of the chaos, is just a notch away from a complete whisper. “On the other moon.”

 

And oh, his stupid, traitorous heart. How it stills.

 

 

☉

 

 

Once, a riff diver had gotten himself stuck in another realm.

 

The story behind it wasn’t atrocious, by any means. He hadn’t been torn to pieces and rendered immobile by a pterodactyl, and then flown from one end of the world to the other like a claw game prize. He hadn’t gotten trapped in a feud between the fae and incapacitated by their famously sticky spellwork. He hadn’t fallen from the top of a very tall mountain and broken his bones in fifteen different places. In fact, he hadn’t broken any bones at all.

 

He’d simply lost his anchor, and with it the means to come back home, to _return_. The ticket for the train trip back, the whole damn thing. Gone, along with all the inconsequential whims of the universe.

 

Naturally, home base had noticed, and his colleagues had noticed, so they had dived in and picked him up and brought him back, missing anchor and cold hands and watery soul and all.

 

But he wasn’t okay for a long, long time after that. Kei knows this— he walked past the man’s cubicle each day for a month out of some kind of childish, morbid curiosity. And every time Kei was there he would be bowed over in his chair, not moving forward, not moving, the little painted amulet that had deserted him when he needed it most clenched in his hands like a lifeline.

 

 

☉

 

 

Kuroo doesn’t need an anchor to dive.

 

They only notice this when he sneaks out of his room at home base one night and ends up in Looking Glass Land, carrying and wearing nothing save for the bandages on his left hand and a shirt and shorts with the price tags still attached. The same clothes they’d given to him two days ago.

 

It’s strange. But all of Kuroo is strange; murky and blurred like hearing a voice over the phone when the line’s dead, like free-falling backwards into the sky. Like math that doesn’t add up no matter how many times you work the numbers out, no matter how careful you try to be.

 

The scientists and the historians and the divers try to be very careful. They still can’t solve anything.

 

Imagine that: a boy, barely twelve, drifting like an untethered astronaut from one realm to another, and another, and another. Never stopping; never stopping to breathe. Imagine that continuous motion, the rocking of the little red rowboat in helplessly hungry waters.

 

Kei overheard the adults talking about it, the way ten-year-olds are made privy to all the secrets of the universe by pure chance. Kei overheard the morbid, muted conversation because he is still small, and then took all their words home. Laid them out on his bedsheets like the disparate pieces of a puzzle, trying to make a coherent story out of the jumbled mess.

 

He can’t. It gives him a headache just trying to comprehend the immensity of it all.

 

Because Kuroo might smile a bit like a _Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus,_ with too much teeth and too little mercy, and Kuroo might have enough secrets to build a whole sandbox city out of them, and sometimes Kei catches him looking out of the floor-to-ceiling windows like he wants to jump right out of them, but Kuroo isn’t— he isn’t what the adults think he is. He can’t be. In spite of it all, and perhaps _because_ of it all, Kei doesn’t want to picture him so terribly alone.

 

He thinks of the lost-and-found man and his painted amulet, the earthquake of his shoulders. Kuroo isn’t even afforded that little bit of mercy. There are no marionette strings attached to the joints of his limbs, no candy trail for him to follow home. Kuroo doesn’t even have this much.

 

No wonder he smiles like that. No wonder.

 

 

☉

 

 

After effectively slapping him across the face with her response, the girl with the silk hair hops off the crate, quick-footed and crow-like, and disappears.

 

Kei doesn’t have it in him anymore to be mad. Everything that both matters and doesn’t matter has been slipping out of his grasp lately. Maybe it’s all the bad karma he’s accumulated from not telling Kuroo when his shoelaces were untied, just so he could watch Kuroo trip down the stairs again. Maybe he’s just a bad person.

 

The last thought is a stupid one. It sounds too much like Kuroo’s highly specific brand of cheerfully self-deprecating humor, which has been chipping away steadily at Kei’s nerves for the last eight years. Kei is resolutely determined not to turn out anything like him.

 

Okay, so he’s not a bad person. But he is surrounded by reasonable persons trying their very damned best to _be_ bad persons, and regardless of their intent the end result is that Kei has to deal. Kei always ends up having to deal.

 

Today’s edition of _Kei Puts Up with Everyone’s Bullshit_ goes like this: Kuroo Tetsurou is on the other moon, in a world where there are two of these fucking humongous rocks and their inhabitants have been embroiled in a civil war since the beginning of time. The civil war is, to be fair, very civil. It’s also been going on for the last millennium.

 

There is a bridge between the two moons, suspended like a promise. It’s one of Oikawa’s favorite places to spend a quiet afternoon brooding about his inadequate, unaccomplished love life, because it’s very fucking hard to get onto, which means only dumbasses like Oikawa are stealthy enough to make it out in one piece. There aren’t a lot of dumbasses like Oikawa.

 

One of those dumbasses, coincidentally (or not, Kei’s lost faith in coincidence at this point), is Kuroo. Kei has no idea what exactly he spends all his time there doing, but Kuroo has crossed that bridge enough times to be able to put together an embellished visual description of the breathtaking, ridiculous sort. Those first few years, when he wasn’t telling Kei about the smooth, fluorescent surface of the bridge, curved like a bowstring and gilded with glittering white lights at arm’s length intervals, he was talking about the guards, the alarms, the barrage of defensive spells. How you had to be extra smart or extra good at tightrope balancing to survive the whole lot of it. Extra lucky.

 

The problem is, Kei isn’t much of either. Everything that both matters and doesn’t matter has been slipping out of his grasp lately, and if he screws this one up then he’s going to lose the biggest one of them all.

 

A human life is a heavy thing to have. He hasn’t gotten any better at handling it since the day Kuroo turned up in Tokyo like a natural disaster, hellbent on making everyone fall in love with him while he sipped cherry soda from a pink straw.

 

The thought keeps Kei occupied for the better part of the afternoon, according to his useless Tokyo-time watch. When his stomach starts growling he follows a shifting crowd into an open storefront and orders a bit of what everyone else is having. He’s got no idea what it is, but it smells and tastes vaguely edible.

 

Emerging from underneath the canopy outside, the crow black sky waves at him, looking exactly the same as it did ten hours ago. He sighs. Maybe the residents of Selenes don’t sleep on top of everything else. He wouldn’t be surprised.

 

He’s about to let himself get sucked back into the flow of bodies when his gaze snags on something familiar. It’s the girl from earlier. Eyelashes.

 

For no reason in particular at all, Kei decides to go after her. He’s already been up and down and up and down the length of the main street a billion times anyway, he tells himself, falling silently into step behind her. That’s enough seesawing to last him several lifetimes.

 

Eyelashes navigates the crowd with an ease and agility that her taciturn nature had not revealed previously. Mimicking the rhythm of her stride, Kei finds himself weaving in and out of throngs of people with newfound ease, feeling more like a disappearing act than an intrusion. It’s refreshing.

 

After threading through a hundred back alleys with the light bled right out of them, Eyelashes finally slips into a shadowy, crack-in-the-wall kind of establishment. One moment she's there, and the next there's nothing but the barely audible rustle of air around him.

 

All of Kei’s evolutionary instincts have joined forces and are collectively telling him to _get the fuck out of here_ while he can, but this is Selenes, not Tokyo, where things are never as they seem. And that's exactly why he has to go. Because if he's not at least half as reckless as Kuroo Tetsurou, horribly handsome and infamously sharp and painfully desirable like all things untouchable are wont to be, then Kei’s never going to reach him.

 

And Kei has to reach him. He made a promise, when he lied to everyone back at home and told them he'd stop at the edge of the danger zone instead of jumping right into it, that he'd find Kuroo, and he’d slap him in the face, and then he’d— He’d—

 

He’s not sure what he’ll do when it happens, because he’s not sure what he _wants_ to do. So that’s another matter for another day.

 

Kei follows the girl inside.

 

 

☉

 

 

The hole-in-the-wall establishment turns out to be every bit the seedy place it had looked like from the outside. This fact becomes apparent to Kei immediately.

 

The realization is so immediate, in fact, that he's hit with a hex right off the bat, one that knocks his glasses cleanly off his face. They go flying into the tall shelf in front with a sharp _clack_ and slide to the ground forlornly.

 

After Kei has waded through the disconcerting silence that follows and retrieved his glasses, he discovers, belatedly, that the shelf is populated with skulls.

 

Mustering up all the self-control left in him, Kei moves gingerly away—

 

—And finds himself face to face with Eyelashes, who now looks much more in her element. Kei isn’t sure if it’s because of the one-eyed monstrosity from earlier perched on her shoulder or the skulls on the shelf. He hopes it’s the former.

 

“What do you want?” She asks, sounding as serene as a small pond, if said pond happened to be filled with piranhas lurking just beneath the pretty painted surface.

 

Kei gulps. There’s really no getting out of this one. “What do you have?” He counters, stalling for time, stalling for what feels profoundly like his life.

 

Noticing the way his eyes have been stuck on the skull-shelf in all its bare boned glory, she puts a hand on Kei’s shoulder and then turns him back towards it.

 

“We’re very proud of our skull collection, if you’re interested in those.” Kei can hear the laugh in her voice. She’s laughing at him. He doesn’t feel eighteen anymore.

 

“But,” she continues, steering him further into the store, further away from the exit. “Most people are interested in our curses. They’re very powerful, the most powerful on this moon.”

 

Eyelashes points at an entire aisle of shelves with spherical objects the size of golf balls.

 

“Curses in Selenes go beyond your standard weeklong voodoo rites or mind control ploys. We can kill, maim, heal, concuss— everything short of bringing the dead back to life.”

 

_Everything short of bringing the dead back to life._

 

There’s a moment in which no one speaks. Kei finally relaxes enough to let his eyes wander around the full perimeter of the store, roving over all sorts of fascinating, terrifying labels. Eyelashes watches with thinly-veiled amusement.

 

“Hypothetically speaking,” Kei says, tentative. “Just hypothetically speaking, if I said I needed to get past some really tight security including, maybe, fifty-three armed guards and forty trap-hexes and a bunch of motion sensors and everything— would you be able to help?”

 

For the first time since their fated meeting behind the marketplace, Eyelashes smiles. _Really_ smiles, the whole dimples-and-teeth-and-narrowed-eyes ensemble blossoming across her face with an almost mischievous air of excitement.

 

“That is nothing,” she answers, proud and aloof, glittering like a jewel in the middle of a seedy hole-in-the-wall establishment that sells murder weapons to befuddled eighteen year olds. “Nothing at all.”

 

 

☉

 

 

It’s not a matter of if, but when.

 

Everyone except Kei expects Kuroo to become a diver.

 

Look at him— at that flippant smile, those pianist’s fingers, the way he leans against the doorframe and looks like he could fall right through the plaster if he wanted to. Look at the whole untethered hot air balloon of his heart. How it could float away at any moment.

 

Not if, but when. Not if, but when.

 

Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence is the fact of his very being. Kuroo doesn’t need an anchor to dive. It makes him stick out like a sore thumb in POOLS’ home base even more than his messy bird’s nest hair. There isn’t a single person here who doesn’t know of him, or about him. Kuroo Tetsurou is already a bit of a legend, even before anything has really happened.

 

So you could call it a natural progression of events when Kuroo turns up one day at home base with a request instead of a stack of math worksheets. With himself; without Kei. To anyone else, it would seem like a perfectly logical thing to do.

 

But to Kei, who has had Kuroo for the last half-decade like a good luck charm (just more for the _good_ than the luck), it’s a dead end. He is still fifteen and slogging his unpleasant teenage angst-ridden way through middle school, still looking forward to wheedling literature interpretations out of Kuroo and hearing him tell tales as tall as skyscrapers.

 

Now Kuroo is leaving, halfway through his second year, halfway through his life. It’s Kei’s turn to hot air balloon his way out of the atmosphere.

 

He’s angry, and confused, and upset, and suddenly the world looks so much meaner, like it did when Akiteru the traitor didn’t go to university and went back to POOLS instead. Kei doesn’t understand why everyone around him is head over heels in love with this, with this _absurd_ diving thing. He’s heard the sensation described as everything from getting run over by a lawnmower to being forced to listen to Oikawa talk about Iwaizumi for an hour straight, so this much he knows: none of it is pleasant, and none of it is fun.

 

They keep going back anyway. All the people in his life, all the ones that matter to him, and now the one that matters to him maybe the most out of them all. _Are you sure about this,_ he wants to ask, _are you really going to leave me behind again._

 

He’s still terrified of swimming pools.

 

But Kei doesn’t throw rocks at the window of Kuroo’s one-room apartment until he comes out, Kei doesn’t ask him _why, why, why,_ Kei doesn’t take his hand and then hold it so tight, the sensation stays with the both of them for days afterwards. Kei— Kei goes home.

 

Not if, but when. Now the other shoe has dropped, so Kei should have known that he wouldn’t get his high school whatever with Kuroo, the afternoons sprawled out doing homework on the UFO-patterned blankets, the boy’s heart, wherever it is.

 

Kei should have known better.

 

 

☉

 

 

Eyelashes’ name is Shimizu.

 

Kei is made privy to this knowledge after he has exchanged half the items in his waterproof backpack for a treasure trove of curses and explosives, and she has finished explaining how to activate everything without blowing himself up too.

 

He listens attentively. Kei wants to blow up a lot of things, but he is not one of them.

 

It turns out modern day Tokyo fare like energy bars and packaged jelly drinks are considered unique artifacts in other realms. That, and the tracker. Kei gives Shimizu all of them, and she takes them wordlessly, but emerges from the store room with a barely detectable spring in her step afterwards.

 

Never mind the fact that Kei towers over her— Shimizu runs this shop, with all its death hexes and glorious rattlesnake traps. Shimizu knows what she’s doing.

 

“This one is my personal favorite. Throw it at your target and cross your pointer and middle fingers, and everyone within a ten-meter radius will get their legs twisted together like vines for a full hour. They won’t be able to get anywhere, I promise.”

 

Kei has so many things to be grateful for in life, even if all his important people are slipping away. He gives her the last of his energy bars, and then bids her good-bye.

 

 

☉

 

 

Seven o’clock in the morning in useless, useless Tokyo time: Tsukishima Kei blows up one end of the Helios bridge.

 

To be completely honest, he has no idea what he’s doing. He presses as close to the edge of the public viewing area as he can, and then skids down a couple of maintenance corridors, and when his stealth skills finally can’t take him any further, he opens his bag.

 

At this point, Kei can’t even remember which bath bomb does what. That’s all they look like to him— like Yachi’s bath bombs, crumbly and powdery and suspicious-smelling in that bizarre, unidentifiable way all bath bombs are.

 

He can’t remember, so he throws all of them.

 

Somehow or another, the double and then triple-barred metal door blasts itself open, and the lock on the next one melts off, and when fifty-three security guards come bursting out of some invisible opening on the side, they collapse into a heap of twisted legs on the ground before him. The motion sensors fry themselves. The hexes are undone.

 

Kei picks his way through the wreckage, feeling strangely powerful. Feeling strangely. Strange. Feeling very strange.

 

Predictably, Shimizu hadn’t been interested in the wedding card zipped up securely in the inner pocket of his bag. Kei takes it out now, runs his hands along the creased side, the minute wrinkles in the paper.

 

When did Kuroo write in it? _Where_ did he write it? Had he been passing through the yawning mouth of a ravine, driving by a field of sunflowers, wading across a pink river of sand? Had he been lonely?

 

_Are you okay? (‘Course I am.) For real? Promise me. Promise me._

 

The adrenalin of the explosion leaving him in gradual blows of heartache, Kei presses his palm to the last door standing between reality and the future.

 

Seven o’clock in the morning in useless, useless Tokyo time: Tsukishima Kei blows up one end of the Helios bridge. It goes very well.

 

 

☉

 

 

Kei’s first thought is: what a long bridge. And then: what a serially, seriously long bridge. And finally: what a fucking bridge.

 

The Helios bridge is very majestic. Carved out of monochrome magic, suspended between the two moons like a promise, it is every bit the meaningless monument it is meant to be. But mainly, it is very long, and Kei cannot see the end of it.

 

So he begins to walk. Waterproof backpack now light as daybreak slung over one shoulder, he leaps onto the perpendicular surface of the bridge, lets the gravity-like pull of magic guide him onto the right path. Kei’s footfalls are light; whispers of moonlight scattered across the luminescent flooring, soundless.

 

The Helios bridge is both monumental and meaningless in Kei’s eyes because in spite of all its splendor, nobody uses it. Nobody is _allowed_ to use it. Built as a symbol of reconciliation, like a handshake between the two opposing wills of the universe, but left to gather space-dust on middle ground instead. Neutral lands that have long since been abandoned.

 

Which is why it’s funny, Kei muses as he moves further and further across the bridge, which is curved like a cat’s arched back and hits a high point the center. It’s funny how Kuroo would like this place— Kuroo, who never quite knew what to do with his heart although his body was gallivanting all around the universe like a freight train. Kuroo, who laughed at Disney films because he thought they were unrealistic, but teared up at the end of Kimi no Na Wa anyway. Kuroo, who never knew, and has never known, anything of reconciliation.

 

When Kei reaches the middle, he turns around and looks over his shoulder at the wreckage he’s left behind on the other moon. Then, slowly, hesitantly, he turns towards the other end of the bridge.

 

_Red._

 

It’s something red. Vividly red. Red in a current, in a tidal wave of gray. Red, like— Like—

 

Kei takes off running, dull gray Converse kicking up clouds of history against the shiny, luminescent ground, security guards and curses and millennia-old civil wars forgotten. He bends down. He picks it up.

 

Imagine this: a bomber jacket, riot red and faded with the ravages of time, a mustard-yellow dragon emblazoned across the back, the words _Tokyo Dreaming_ embroidered in looping cursive below that.

 

Imagine this: a world where the color is bleached from everything. A riot red bomber.

 

Imagine that. Imagine Kuroo.

 

 

☉

 

 

When Kei is eight, he almost drowns, but no one can tell him why. No one can dissect the swimming pool because it doesn’t belong to them; no one can dissect Kei because he won’t let anybody get close enough to touch him.

 

Then Kuroo arrives, and he is so much more afraid of hand-holding and dinosaurs and everything under the bright egg yolk of the Tokyo sun than even Kei. Kei feels like he has to do something.

 

He doesn’t dissect Kuroo, because Kei isn’t like that, and Kei hates it when people try to turn him into mathematical equations. Instead, he sits with Kuroo in the guest room at home base, brings him Tirol chocolates from the _konbini_ near his school, and talks about his dinosaur figurines.

 

For the first few weeks, Kuroo is quiet. Wary, beneath the thin veneer of fragile, frivolous laughter and rubbery smiles; always showing some kind of an expression, no matter how flat or transparent, as if he’s terrified of being empty. As if he’s terrified of himself.

 

Kei doesn’t really mind. He’s ten, and he hasn’t met Hinata or Kageyama or Yachi yet but he has met Oikawa once without knowing his name, and he has known Yamaguchi all his life. He has classmates in primary school who throw erasers at the ceiling fan just to see where they’ll go afterwards.

 

People are weird— Kei knows this.

 

So he plays with his dinosaur figurines on the cold marble floor of Kuroo’s room, and thinks about how _konbini_ cashiers look really suspicious sometimes, almost like they’re not human. He tells Kuroo about this, just once, a passing thought like a rabbit-shaped cloud amidst all the other things he tells Kuroo, because he is still child-young and innocent and he has not quite learned to hide his own feelings in the folds of tissue paper packets yet.

 

It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon. Kuroo taps him on the shoulder so Kei turns around, and accidentally gets a face full of gleaming, Cheshire cat cheer. A smile that’s just a little less rubbery, a little more real.

 

“Did you know, Tsukki,” he says, and Kei notes absentmindedly that he already has a nickname even though this is their first proper conversation. “That _konbini_ cashiers are all secretly robots?”

 

Kei hadn’t known. Maybe Kei hadn’t known anything at all, before Kuroo.

 

“No,” Kei says, because he is still young, which means he is still honest.

 

 

☉

 

 

The red bomber smells like him. Like sweet Osmanthus and winter and hair gel; like summer.

 

Kei holds it like a lifeline, buries his face in the smear of bright color, sucks in gaping lungfuls of air like he’s drowning, like he’s dying. Then he puts it on, the generous give of fabric falling over his narrower shoulders. He puts it on.

 

And then he heads back the way he came from.

 

 

☉

 

 

“You spend half of your life out there in other realms, doing God knows what with God knows who, so I don’t think you really need me, honestly. I don’t know if you even trust me anymore. You never tell me anything, Kuroo. You never did.

 

I don’t know. I’m just tired. I never see your stupid face around anymore.

 

Where are you? I mean, seriously. Where are you?”

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> i realized about halfway through chapter two that once again i had somehow managed to avoid creating a conventional narrative yet again but here i am anyway. that's the goods for the day. i have a history essay test tomorrow so i'm dropping this off earlier than usual and then running my ass back to die over southeast asian national unity. if you liked what you read, please do consider letting me know your thoughts on stuff. i always appreciate it deeply and will do my best to actually respond to comments
> 
> have a good one


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I don’t know where I am,” Kuroo says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shit approaches the fan

_“What if I end up like one of those planets?”_

  
_  
_ “Huh?”

 

_“What if I turned into a wandering star, too, Tsukki?”_

 

_“Did you eat too many marshmallows after dinner again, Kuroo.”_

 

_“No, seriously, what would I do? What would you do?”_

 

_“I—”_

 

☉

 

Tsukki lands on the ceiling.

 

He shouldn’t be quite as surprised as he is, but you’ve got to cut him some slack. He’s landed on the fucking ceiling. That’s weird. It doesn’t matter that he had known that the next realm would be weird; he’s allowed to have insecurities after the ordeal he’s been through in the last few days.

 

Falling out of the window for the rest of his life is one of them, he thinks, peering out of the one affixed to the far wall. Below him, an endless expanse of sky eats greedily into his field of vision. It leaves no space for contemplation; if he takes a plunge into that, he’s never coming back.

 

Meanwhile, dirt and grass and pebbled pathways form the solid ground outside above his head, looking very reassuring and yet very useless. What’s the point of having roads if no one’s going to walk on them? And why in Satan’s holy asshole did Kuroo decide he wanted this realm to be one of his regular haunts? Enough that Kei has to deal with corpse-culled deserts and double moons, now he’s going to have to hold his breath everywhere he goes.

 

 _Welcome to the Upside Down,_ a sign hanging from the floor (Or should he say, ceiling? It’s technically above him, but has all the makings of regular tiled flooring. Kei can feel a headache coming.) greets him cheerily, dangling from an ominous looking metal chain. Do they get a lot of visitors from this shitty goddamn swimming pool embedded in the ceiling? Kei has questions, and no one to throw them at.

 

Much to his chagrin, he seems to be getting accustomed to being sucked into figurative vacuum cleaners. He feels fairly steady on his feet, despite the fact that the ground beneath is nothing but a thin slab of concrete and metal wires, probably. With a faint jab of resentment, he wonders if this is why Kuroo turned out the way he did— because he spent too much time slinking down back alleys and across fragile ceilings made of dust.

 

Anyway, the room is empty, and inverted, and vivid like a technicolor photograph. It’s a welcome sight for Kei’s eyes, if nothing else, that he can lay his gaze upon familiar, comforting shades like _shitty Monday morning blue_ and _pretentious hipster yellow._ He does his best to hold onto that shred of positivity as he makes his way to the exit.

 

On the other side of the lime green door is a sorry, thin-wooden-planks-and-knotted-ropes excuse for a bridge. Kei thinks about Selenes and the solid sensation of the Helios bridge under his feet. Sudden and inexplicable homesickness washes over him.

 

In spite of all his extremely well-founded misgivings, Kei moves forward. He’s got no other choice, really. Either he goes out there, or he goes somewhere else and risks letting Kuroo win this game of hide and seek. There are two people Kei knows who hate losing with every fiber of their being: one is Kuroo, and the other is himself.

 

So Kei clenches his jaw and moves gingerly towards the first wooden plank, strung up in a series of longer, hopefully-more-sturdy planks like glass beads on a necklace. The bridge sways with the newfound addition of his weight; Kei feels his heart fall through his chest and hit the bottom of his stomach with a sickening thud.

 

It’s barely been five minutes, but fuck this place. Fuck this place and everything it stands for.

 

And fuck Kuroo Tetsurou, too, for his decisively feline ancestry and his penchant for dizzying heights. It makes perfect sense that he’d take a fancy to a realm like this, all thin, precarious bridges and bizarre-looking houses suspended from the upturned earth. Kuroo has always had a thing for almost getting himself killed— it’s one of the many aspects of his personality Kei has never been able to make sense of.

 

Gathering the remaining coffee-dregs of his bravery, Kei puts another foot forward. The bridge makes a sound like a deflating balloon dog. Kei almost dies right there and then.

 

It’s going to be a long, long morning.

 

☉

 

Kei finally gets a glimpse of Kuroo’s left hand after many, many weeks of darkness.

 

Before that, it had been hidden beneath so many rolls of bandages and surgical tape that it had looked less like a hand and more like one of Frankenstein’s creations; alien, unsettling, strange. Now, it looks normal.

 

Well, for the most part, except Kei catches Kuroo clenching and unfurling his fingers over and over again out of the corner of his eye sometimes, the action small and unassuming, save for the fact that one finger doesn’t follow the rest. One finger, his left pinky, stays curled loosely into his palm no matter what, like an old man who’s given up on straightening up his back. Like something cut loose from the rest of him, something unwanted.

 

Kei asks him about it once, when they’re wandering down one of the many hallways on the twenty-fifth floor, playing a game called Which Doors Can We Open Without Getting Yelled at. So far, Kuroo’s winning, if only because he’s good at escaping from the source of the yelling even if he opens the wrong door. As for Kei, he’s always been stoic, so he deals with the disapproval and stern rebukes in the best way he knows to: by nodding a lot, and letting the tall legs of dinosaurs crowd over his vision.

 

A lull appears in their game when the doors start appearing with huge watermelon-sized metal locks and double, triple bolts. Now that there's nothing left to open (and thereby destroy), Kei’s mind starts to wander. The words escape from him before he can think to look at them again.

 

“Why is your pinky like that?”

 

Tact. Tsukishima Kei, at the tender age of ten, has no tact. He’ll come to realize this later, when his stark honesty costs him a few friendships and makes him a hundred more red-faced, self-declared enemies at the playground.

 

He’ll come to realize this later, but for now he asks _why is your pinky like that,_ and Kuroo stops slouching for a second to bend over backwards until Kei can see his eyes gleaming under his bangs.

 

“Because,” he replies, flippant.

 

Kei pushes his glasses up his nose and peers at him. “Because?”

 

“Because.”

 

With an air of finality, Kuroo goes back to sauntering down the hallway, ducking neatly into the toilet when one of the researchers appears behind Kei like an evil monster and places her hand on his shoulder.

 

“What are you doing here?” She asks with menace.

 

Kei tries to do the dinosaur thing, and fails.

 

☉

 

The matter of Kuroo’s left hand soon becomes irrelevant as he gets enrolled into Kei’s school, and Kei is suddenly preoccupied with far more things than he finds himself capable of juggling. This preoccupation, shaped like a black cat with too much, too-messy bedhead, continues to occupy him for many years. Somewhere along the way, it stops being a preoccupation, and starts being a fascination. Kei won’t call it an obsession, no matter what Yamaguchi, or even the stubborn voice in his head, says. Kei won’t call it anything but what it is, and he knows what it is. He knows how the world works.

 

It works very simply, like a mathematical equation. Dy by dx, differentiate with reference to part (i). There’s only one correct answer, and it’s your job to find it.

 

So Kei’s job is to be Kuroo the drop-dead ~~gorgeous~~ annoying boy’s friend while he learns how to make sense of Tokyo in all its brilliant, neon-tinted glory. His support, if you will, because no one else quite understands what Kuroo needs when he gets into one of his moods and starts looking wistfully out of windows like he wants to break them.

 

Kei understands this much. He sees the unmapped mountain ridges of Kuroo’s heart, and wonders how to cross them, if there’s some kind of path through that doesn’t involve tearing down all that beautiful wilderness. He sees Kuroo’s shadow, twitching where its chained to his feet like it can’t wait to escape from the tense slope of Kuroo’s shoulders.

  
Kei sees, and processes the images, and doesn’t do anything. Kuroo will get over these things, he thinks willfully. Kuroo will get over them, and then he will go tearing down the streets like a dream on a motorcycle with Christmas light modifications on its wheels. He will find somebody like sunshine, and take them home. He will leave Kei behind.

 

He’s fifteen when he asks Kuroo, offhandedly, if he’ll ever talk about his left hand, the mystery of his curled-up pinky.

 

Kuroo flashes him a crooked smile, loose and lazy but deliberately so, the way all of him looks like a carefully-crafted mirage in the summer heat.

 

He says, “Maybe one day.” Kei thinks his eyes say _never._

 

☉

 

There is a disturbance in the Upside Down. An uncertainty to the knotted, fraying ropes that bind each bridge together; a bruised blue quality to the sky beneath him, like it wants to drag him right into its cold, cloudless embrace.

 

It does, indeed, take Kei the better part of the morning to make it more than a hundred meters away from his entry point. When he finally tumbles into a fifth (or sixth, maybe, he’s lost track) building, he’s lost all feeling in his legs. And about twenty years off his life.

  
Like Archimedes, the Upside Down seems to be quite utterly devoid of life. It’s eerie, how every bridge and building is empty and yet generously furnished with lighting appliances, furniture, well-stocked fridges with fruits and vegetables and cuts of cheese, all of it still in good condition. Kei takes a couple of items from a pantry, and tries not to feel too bad about it.

 

After all, on top of being completely inverted and deserted and everything else in between, this place is also unearthly in its silence. Not even the air seems to react to Kei’s movements, as if this realm were the set of a movie where someone hit the pause button, and then forgot to come back. The crayon-colors surrounding him make it look like a children’s picture book, only no child would likely ever read a book like this. Or, at least, he hopes no child ever has to.

 

Kei feels the disquiet down to his bones, to the way his hands shiver as he shoves them into the pockets of Kuroo’s red bomber jacket.

 

There is a disturbance in the Upside Down. Kei can’t quite pin it down, but he knows it’s there. He knows.

 

The first sounds of this realm reach him as he goes rifling through the cabinets in another building. They start out faint, barely detectable shuffling and hissing sounds removed from Kei’s immediate surroundings, and then gradually get louder and sharper, until Kei can make out two distinct voices.

 

Two voices that belong to two far too familiar faces. Faces which he should really _not_ be seeing here. Not at all.

 

Kei sort of didn’t tell the crew back at home base that he’d be visiting the Upside Down. He didn't tell them a lot of things, like how he had never intended on taking a two-day trip to the figurative Bahamas of realm diving from the beginning, but he has a feeling this would have alarmed them even more than the whole extended vacation deal, anyway.

 

So he couldn’t have told them, not with the way they’d always talked about this realm, the way Kuroo had spoken of the unsettling quiet like it was a blessing to have in his hands. Kuroo is instinctively drawn to danger. Kei has compiled a list of these things. It goes like this.

 

A List of Things That Attract Kuroo Tetsurou To Certain Places, No Matter How Dangerous or Desolate:

 

  1. There are ghosts.
  2. There are no people, and ghosts.
  3. There are people, who are all ghosts.



 

Kei wonders which of these criteria the Upside Down fulfills, and hopes he doesn’t stick around long enough to find out.

 

The fact that Hinata and Kageyama are charging across the bridge connected to the house he’s presently occupying is decidedly not helping.

 

_Fuck._

 

Leaping to his feet, Kei silently curses the duo’s turbo-powered _everything_ while he flings himself out the door on the other side and plants his feet firmly on the first wooden plank of the bridge outside.

 

Hinata makes it inside first, with Kageyama hot on his heels. Kei watches as they survey the perimeter of the place, sticking their heads out of windows and not-windows and occasionally knocking into perfectly harmless household appliances.

 

Kei watches, at least, until he has to stop watching and then duck down and lie horizontally across the length of the bridge like a sacrifice to the gods below. If he doesn’t die now, he thinks, face pressed into a gap between two wooden planks, he’s definitely going to die later. The sky underneath him is slowly turning to dust and sunset, some invisible source of light retreating back to wherever the hell things go in this realm. He can see his life flashing before his eyes.

 

Taking advantage of a groundbreaking moment, in which both of his idiot friends are distracted by an electronic toaster, Kei runs the last few meters to the other side of the bridge and then throws himself inside. He shuts the door gently behind him, turns the lock, and then falls backwards onto the sweet, blessed floor.

 

Then he gets up, because the floor isn’t that comfortable after all.

 

This suspended architectural miracle is the largest he’s come across so far, Kei notices belatedly. He appears to be standing in some kind of entryway, judging by the short flight of steps overhead and the hallway it opens up into. Beyond the hallway is an airy living space that splits off into a bedroom and a toilet. There’s even a kitchen of all things, tucked off to the side and filled with a ridiculous assortment of items.

 

That’s cool and all, but Kei realizes, along with all of the other cool discoveries he's made of late, that he’s too tired to give a proper shit right now. Hinata and Kageyama are a glorious pain in the ass to deal with even on the nice days, when his biggest concern involves solving the bonus question on his biology tutorial. Hinata and Kageyama are a pain in the ass to deal with, even in Tokyo. And this is not Tokyo. He lets himself into the vacant bedroom and draws the curtains.

 

Diving under the blankets, he lets sleep draw him into its warm, waiting embrace, the bomber jacket wrapped around his shoulders like a charm.

 

☉

 

_Question 3:_

_Why do you keep lying to yourself about your feelings?_

 

☉

 

Kuroo is barely seventeen when he turns up at home base with a request instead of a stack of math worksheets. He says: I want to be a diver. And when Ukai and the other higher-ups look at him like he’s sprouted wings and horns and like five extra arms, he adds, as an afterthought: please.

 

As a general rule of POOLS, divers are only allowed out into the field when they’ve turned eighteen. This helps maintain the sanity of both the administrative team and the divers themselves. This helps keep the missing persons list in the lobby as short as they can get it to be.

 

But as a general rule, Kuroo Tetsurou seems to exist outside of the general rules of POOLS, which is why when he says please and puts on his I-am-a-mature-adult-I-swear-it face and takes his hands out of the pockets of his jeans, the temperature in the room climbs back up to bearable levels of lukewarm discomfort. He knows he’s won. He knows.

 

Having Kuroo around at home base is convenient for a lot of reasons. He’s snarky and sarcastic enough to hold his own against the team of constantly-buzzed-on-caffeine trainees, but gifted with the kind of situational awareness that lets him escape a kaleidoscope of tricky situations unscathed. He’s the only one willing to do coffee runs to The Caged Bird after two a.m. no matter the weather, and the only guy with enough cool determination and insufferable laughter in his voice to defuse any and every argument that erupts on the fortieth floor.

 

Sure, he’s rough and reckless when he steps outside of Tokyo, but he gets the job done, and he gets himself back to the city every time. Mostly in one piece.

 

The eclipsing year heralds a fresh wave of divers, ready to wreak havoc across the universe. Kuroo meets Oikawa and Sawamura and the rest of the newly-initiated, and the number of starry-eyed youths with dreams bigger than their own hearts skyrockets. His eighteenth birthday ushers in a painter’s palette of fresh bruises, hidden under rolled down shirtsleeves and long socks patterned with cat paw prints. His eighteenth birthday comes and passes, and nothing really changes.

 

Kei had not expected it to happen. Now that it had happened, he found himself hoping that he would be able to accept the new arrangement, if nothing else.

 

But the state of the world, according to Kuroo Tetsurou, is a brilliant, blazing thing. A little like a firework, more accurately like a firecracker in your backyard. This close to setting the lawn grass ablaze.

 

On the other hand, if you asked Kei, he would say the state of the world, with Kuroo out of school and almost completely gone from his life as if he were nothing more than some kind of spectral hallucination, is a fragile, crumbling thing. Much akin to apple pie with a crumbly biscuit base; much akin to deflated lungs. The frustration builds in Kei like a tsunami wave, gathering speed and intensity as it goes roaring across the Pacific Ocean. It builds, and it builds, and it builds.

 

The flooded coastal town, the bloody aftermath, all the missing persons with their names tacked up on the sign board in the lobby. All of it inevitable.

 

The argument, when it finally arrives, comes at the roundabout end of fall. Always Kei’s favorite season, he is very sorry to see it go.

 

Kuroo, always Kei’s favorite person (but silently, without admission, and for reasons Kei is still entirely unsure about), is very sorry to go too. But Kei leaves him little choice. Kei pushes him out into the figurative dirt road outside his figurative house, slams the figurative door shut, and then stands in the doorway in his red Converse wishing he were just fractionally, fractionally better at being human.

 

_You spend half your life out there— don’t think you really need me— if you even trust— never tell me anything—_

 

_Where are you? Where are you?_

 

Kei is a terrible human being. But the last few months have been terrible, too, even though it was fall and the leaves were all going back to the earth so they could be reborn as better versions of themselves. Even though he’d been getting strawberry shortcakes from The Caged Bird on a near-weekly basis and scoring straight A’s on all his tests as the result of some kind of bizarre, unasked for side effect. Even though he hadn’t been alone.

 

The argument, when it finally arrives, is so quiet, even the buzz of electricity through the streetlight above them is louder. Even Kei’s heartbeat is louder. Everything is louder than—

 

Kuroo, when Kei is done monologuing, tilts his face towards the sky. He breathes.

 

“I don’t know where I am,” he says, his voice like an old, sad song on the radio. Only this radio is steadily moving further and further away from Kei, who is frozen like a Shutterstock image in the swimming pool of light that has swallowed both of them up, band-aid hearts and words and all. Only this song has the wrong lyrics. They're the ones from the ballad about saying goodbye forever. The ones Kei didn’t mean to memorize.

 

Kuroo turns his face to the side, letting darkness coil around the other half of his soft-sharp features, the angular jut of his cheekbones.

 

“If I told you I couldn’t settle down because my legs wouldn’t let me. Because my heart wouldn’t let me. If I told you I couldn’t stop moving.”

 

Kuroo’s face is blank, and it’s worse somehow. Kuroo, with a smile or a frown or fire in his eyes, is still trying. Kuroo, wearing nothing on his pretty, pretty face is not.

 

“I want to say I can explain, that I hope you’ll understand. But that’s a lot to ask.”

 

Kuroo’s face is blank. Kuroo’s hands, his pianist’s hands, are shaking like the gentlest earthquake where they’re shoved into the pockets of his worn drawstring pants.

 

“I know it’s a lot, so I won’t ask.”

 

Fall begins its annual descent into the soft penumbra of winter. Kei says everything he never, ever wanted to. Kuroo walks away. All of it, inevitable.

 

Three months later, Kuroo disappears, and who can fault Kei for thinking that it's _his_ fault. Who can fault Kei.

 

☉

 

In this dream Kuroo’s leaning over him and Kei’s back is pressed against cool glass. Kuroo’s hands are cupped around his cheeks, barely a breath of space between them.

 

In this dream they’re in a train carriage. Tokyo flashes past them in shades of blue-green-white and shiny metallic gray and Kuroo has his palms on Kei’s cheeks. Kei has his hands in the front pockets of Kuroo’s too-tight jeans. He’s searching for something. They both are.

 

The train lurches and Kei falls forward, bumping their foreheads together. He opens his mouth to apologize but the carriage fills up with water that rushes into his lungs and heart and all the spaces between his ribs. He can’t talk anymore. Kuroo disappears, so he can’t tell him anything anymore.

 

He blinks and suddenly there’s a child-sized Kuroo sitting on a seat across from Kei, stubby legs dangling over the edge.

 

 _I can dive,_ tiny Kuroo says. _What can you do?_

 

Kei’s cheeks are cold. He tries to move forward, and finds that he can’t.

 

 _I can—_ he swallows another mouthful of water. _I can—_

 

Tiny Kuroo rattles off a list of achievements. _I can play the piano. I can name all the knights in the castle. I can do a handstand._

 

 _I—_ Water, water, everywhere.

 

They’re at the bottom of a swimming pool, both of them child-small again, playing hide and seek with the world. Kuroo’s left hand is buried under a Frankenstein apparition of bandages. Kei is shorter than him still.

 

Kei is searching for something, and the bottom of the pool is turquoise, patterned with sunlight. Kei is searching for something.

 

 _What can you do?_ Kuroo asks, cocking his head to one side.

 

Kei opens his mouth, and this time it doesn’t fill immediately with water.

 

_I can be—_

 

☉

 

Kei opens his eyes to stifling darkness.

 

There’s someone in the room. Hovering over him on the bed, hands and knees sunk into the mattress.

 

There's someone in the room, blowing warm air against his face. There’s something wet on the collar of Kei’s shirt. There’s something wrong.

 

Operating on instinct alone, Kei kicks out blindly, a sudden flurry of motion, but it doesn't connect with anything. The figure leaps cleanly to the side, stepping into the pale moonlight with a slouch in his step, a subtle jolt.

 

Even then, it takes an excruciating second for Kei’s vision to adjust. Even then, it takes Kei a moment to take in those melted-butter eyes, that familiar bird’s nest hair.

 

Kuroo Tetsurou looks at him from the opposite side of the room.

 

He smiles wanly.

 

“It’s been a while, Tsukki.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> ok so i took a look at my finals timetable and at my upload schedule and i realized i'm going to be posting right up through finals week like this so there may or may not be more mid-week updates from here on. by mid-week i mean middle of the week when i should not be updating. yeah. YEAH  
> next chapter should be up on thursday as per usual, since i've got everything written up until chapter 7 and life's all right so far. actually, i have my japanese oral final on wednesday so maybe not but fuck it and die amirite.  
> thank you guys for reading!! i really, really appreciate every kudo, comment, and bookmark i've received from the bottom of my cold dead heart. it gives me the motivation to write the conclusion which i am very scared of writing. also, i know this isn't a very conventional storytelling method so i'm incredibly grateful to all of you for putting up with my lack of experience in the narrative department. see yall on thursday.
> 
> have a good one


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Your hands.”
> 
> “Hmm?”
> 
> “Show me your hands.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for slight descriptions of blood and wounds, but honestly i have no idea what i'm talking about so you probably won't either

Kuroo owns a lot of bomber jackets. Like, fifteen of them. He’s never really been a stickler for fashion or clothes or looks on the whole, as far as Kei’s aware, but he figures something about the glossy lipstick shine of those souvenir jackets lined up in Harajuku must have called out to him once. It probably happened a long time ago, along with the rest of the miraculous encounters that form the skeleton of Kuroo’s shapeless, soundless memories. It probably happened.

 

His collection starts in his second year of middle school, when he finally saves up enough from the allowance he’s granted by POOLS to buy the pastel pink bomber from Forever 21 he’s been eyeing for the past month. One of the mannequins displayed outside has been wearing it since forever. Kuroo has wanted the jacket since forever.

 

Kei is secretly glad to see Kuroo swaggering up and down the hallways of POOLS’ home base in his shiny pink bomber jacket and hand-me-down Adidas sneakers. He doesn’t tell Kuroo this, because he doesn’t see any reason to. Kuroo looks happy. That’s good enough for Kei.

 

Happiness looks good on him, but then and again, pretty much everything does. Kei is twelve and far from an intellectually enlightened human being, but he has resigned himself to these invasive, unignorable thoughts already. So Kuroo Tetsurou looks cute in bomber jackets and every shade of pink in the universe— so what? It’s a simple, factual observation. Kei is allowed to make objective statements about the universe, and Kuroo is, for better or worse, inevitably a part of it.

 

Because Kuroo might be annoying and overconfident, and he might try to balance on sidewalks and end up falling off of them far too often, and he might send Kei texts in class when he’s bored that Kei feels obligated to respond to for some reason, but Kuroo also keeps a little Totoro-shaped piggy bank in his room at home base. He puts a couple hundred yen in every week, no matter how the week unfolds, no matter how many times he goes out. Kei knows this because Kuroo told him about it once, his voice betraying a faint hint of pride despite the nonchalant way in which he’d tried to bring the topic up. Kuroo told him about it once, and the show of trust had left Kei’s head spinning, just a little.

 

Kuroo treats his Totoro piggy bank like a treasure chest, because even after two years there is still sparingly little that he holds close to himself. Most of his stuff consists of hand-me-downs, like his black Adidas sneakers, from various passionate members of staff at POOLS. Everything’s clean and functional so so what if it's a little scuffed, it serves its purpose. It’s good enough for Kuroo, who grins and bows respectfully and treats every day like Christmas morning. It’s good enough.

 

But sometimes Kei sees Kuroo picking absentmindedly at the loose threads skirting the hems of his too-small, too-big shirts. Sometimes Kei sees Kuroo, fourteen years young and already uncomfortable in his own skin. Humming a song Kei can’t quite place, wearing an expression Kei doesn’t know how to describe with his primary school vocabulary lists. Not quite sad, or angry, or even lonely— something more nuanced than that. Something more profound.

 

For Kei’s twelfth birthday, he asks for the fanciest, most extravagant silk bomber jacket in the world.

 

“You mean, in _all_ the worlds,” his mother corrects him, smiling reproachfully.

 

His father ruffles the top of his hair, affectionate. He smells faintly of lab chemicals. “Of course he does.”

 

Akiteru, who is not a traitor yet, just looks at him funnily from the other end of the dining table. Stabbing his fork with emotion into his pasta, he mouths something at Kei, which Kei fails to catch. He goes back to sipping milk from his dinosaur-shaped mug.

 

☉

 

For Kei’s twelfth birthday, he asks for the coolest bomber jacket in all the worlds, and he gets it. The next day, he presents it to Kuroo, clean and unworn with the label still attached to the collar.

 

Later on, Kei will start to call it tacky, when Kuroo becomes too attached and begins to parade it around everywhere he goes. Later on, Kei will glower at Kuroo whenever he declares his undying love for _shy little Tsukki, who does care after all._ Later on, Kei will deny that he ever wasted a birthday wish on Kuroo Tetsurou, the Cheshire cat boy from Alice in Wonderland. Later.

 

Now, Kei watches with unrestrained curiosity as Kuroo meticulously removes the wrapping paper from around his Christmas/Halloween/birthday/whatever _-just-take-it_ gift. He’s careful almost to a fault; the clear tape comes off without ripping anything to pieces, the clumsy folds in the paper gently, patiently smoothed out.

 

Kuroo declares immediately that the jacket is his favorite thing ever. He does so in a teasing, singsong voice, oohing and aahing over the riot red fabric, the mustard yellow dragon, the looping cursive letters that form the bold _Tokyo Dreaming_ embroidered below that. It’s huge, because Kei had demanded extravagance and his parents had gone all out on the sourcing side of things, so it looks kind of like a medieval king’s cape. It’s huge, even for Kuroo.

 

“I love it,” Kuroo tells him, grinning so wide Kei thinks his face might just split in half. Grinning so wide, it doesn’t look much like a trademark Kuroo smile, which is more controlled and more refined. More feline. Kei finds this fascinating.

 

Still, Kuroo is Kuroo, and Kei remains unsure of how much he actually means of what he says. He’s just glad Kuroo doesn’t hate it. He’s relieved.

 

Then Kuroo turns up at his house three times in a row with the red bomber shrugged on over a loose threadbare shirt and baggy drawstring pants. Kei tells him it’s hideous at least twice. Kuroo keeps wearing it.

 

Even after Kei moves up to his first year of middle school and Kuroo accidentally lands in his third, he doesn't stop wearing it. He wears it on top of his uniform, which is a stiff, black-collared thing, and it looks hilarious. He wears it in the summer, when the temperatures go hard enough to send even the crows into the shade of the gingko trees. He wears it in the place he's supposed to call home, swaggering up and down the hallways like a misplaced fashion model.

 

Kuroo owns a lot of bomber jackets. Like, fifteen of them. But he has a favorite one.

 

☉

 

After Kuroo says his stupid cliché one-liner and Kei admits to himself that he hasn’t actually woken from a fever dream to another fever dream, he turns on the lights. There’s a faint glow emanating from the paper moon crumpled up in the sky beneath them, but it’s hardly enough to go by, not when this is their first meeting in— Kei traces the passage of seasons in his head— three months.

 

It doesn’t sound like a long time. But Kuroo has been a constant in almost half of Kei’s life now, with his evil mind-reading goggles and secretly kind smiles, Kuroo has been gone for much longer than three months in Kei’s head. In Kei’s head, the events that unfolded under the midnight streetlight that day have been replayed so many times, the hurt in Kuroo’s eyes has vanished. It belongs to Kei now, alongside all of his stupid, childish mistakes.

 

So Kei turns on the lights, and lets them chase the encroaching shadows away.

 

Kuroo flinches at the glare. The gesture is so small that if Kei hadn’t known what to look out for, he would have missed it. The gesture is so small. Measured, like a circus act on a tightrope, the coordinates of each footstep from the position of the stars and the moon above them.

 

His hair is a little longer now, a little wilder. It juts out at acidic angles and resembles a twisted tangle of wires, like it’s been charged with static. His face is a little thinner, shadows etched into the spaces underneath his eyes and the hollow of his cheekbones. There’s stubble on his jaw, faintly visible. There’s his jaw, Kuroo’s jaw, sharp enough to cut yourself on. There’s Kuroo’s smile.

 

Forcibly tearing his gaze away, Kei redirects it to a spot on the flawlessly clean wall. He keeps his voice flat when he finally finds it, locked up in a box buried under his ribcage. He keeps his voice as flat as he can.

 

“What the fuck are you doing here.”

 

(But mostly, he just sounds tired.)

 

Casually, very casually, Kuroo leans his hip against the wall, his hands hidden in the pockets of his ripped jeans. He’s wearing a thin black shirt that Kei doesn’t remember him owning alongside red sneakers, a smile like melted plastic. His back is hidden out of sight, his torso angled in Kei’s direction.

 

All in all, it is a terrible look. Kei wants to— Kei wants to hit him immediately. Or hold him. It doesn’t really matter, as long as he can get his hands on Kuroo somehow, sometime; he’s so fucking tired of all this. He’s eighteen, he’s had an awful dream, he’s exhausted. Kuroo is everywhere except where he should be. Kei’s heart is everywhere.

 

“I could ask the same of you,” Kuroo answers, and he sounds more tired than even Kei, which is the first alarm bell, but there is something new in his voice, something strained, and therein lies the second.

 

Kei’s across the room in three paces. He presses forward into Kuroo’s space, narrowing his eyes. There’s a smell in the air around him— of winter and sweet Osmanthus and hair gel but something else, too. Something that shouldn’t be there.

 

There is a disturbance in the Upside Down. Here is the first one: Kuroo smells like death.

 

Dimly Kei recalls the dampness on his collar, like a leaky faucet dripping onto his shirt. He thumbs the fabric; his fingers come away sickening, sickeningly red.

 

Forcing the growing sensation of horror in his throat down, Kei holds his hand up. Palm forward, facing Kuroo.

 

“Tell me what happened.”

 

☉

 

Kuroo Tetsurou’s life can be split cleanly down the middle. The split happens here: at the juncture between Tokyo and free-falling, between lost and found. The split happens here: at the red-light intersection. Everything burning.

 

After the split there are middle school uniforms and diver’s theory lectures and hot _konbini_ coffees in Styrofoam cups. But before the split— Before the split, there is nothing.

 

Kuroo doesn’t remember anything that happened prior to the two years he spent alone, before they dragged him to the city and told him _you can come back here any time you want._ That is why he splits himself cleanly down the middle when he is twelve and then caught with a hand in the back pocket of an alarmed-looking riff diver. That is why he said _dunno_ to everything Kei asked him that day, sunk into a too-big armchair in the executive lounge of an unfamiliar building. It is what it is. It is.

 

And so Kuroo is what he is, which is loud and soft and annoying and kind and alarmingly bad at reading Japan’s traffic signs for the first year or so. They’re not all that different from those in other countries, as far as Kei is aware. Kuroo’s not all that different from most kids his age.

 

But he is. He is.

 

☉

 

Kei wishes this were a fever dream. He wishes it with all of his eighteen year-old heart. He wishes it so hard, for a second he almost believes he’ll be able to will it into existence. _Local Tokyo boy meets estranged best friend in an unfamiliar land: lucky for him, it’s just a dream!_ He can see the newspaper headline already.

 

But fuck, and _fuck,_ because this isn’t a fever dream. And that’s too bad for Kei, too bad he didn’t pick up the signs earlier because he was too busy trying not to lose his mind over the fact that Kuroo fucking Tetsurou had, for the briefest of moments, been hovering over his sleep-riddled form, his hands and knees making indents in the mattress.

 

Because now Kei’s been forced onto the set of a movie, and he doesn’t know who wrote the script. There’s a description for a tall blond dumbass, and there’s another one for a Renaissance painting with bird’s nest hair. Bird-hair leans against the wall like a supermodel and acts nonchalant in the artificial light, his sharp features schooled into a dull facade of disinterest. The tall blond dumbass refuses to meet his eyes.

 

But look at this place. Look at it. They’re in a house hanging upside down from the ground, for fuck’s sake. Now that Kei’s actually paying attention to his surroundings, he’s picked up the sound of uneven scratching outside the window. Now that Kei’s actually paying attention, he can meet Kuroo’s eyes.

 

Kei’s raised hand stays like an accusation between them, dipped in blood. Kuroo almost looks relieved. It is uncharacteristic of him.

 

“Sure,” he says, and his voice is so much heavier when he’s not working to keep it afloat. “But I’m gonna trouble you with something else first, if you don’t mind.”

 

Kei is suddenly immensely grateful to the whole annoying bothersome lot back in Tokyo for the first aid kid.

 

When Kuroo pulls away from the wall he leaves a bright red smear amidst the sunny yellow. It’s jarring.

 

Kei gets his stuff out, looking expectantly at Kuroo. In any other situation he would have rolled his eyes or raised an eyebrow, but this is the set of a tasteless, terrible movie. This is a shitty script.

 

A sigh. Very, very reluctantly, Kuroo pulls his hands out of his pockets, palms turned away. Very, very gingerly, he peels his shirt off. That is, the tattered remains of the back of it, because it turns out only his front was presentable after all. He turns around.

 

_Oh._

 

Kei is, for the second time today, at a complete loss for words. An intricate pattern of crisscrossing cuts is sprawled across Kuroo’s back like Tokyo’s metro map or maybe a war casualty, the lines jagged and raw and still wet. Kei is at a complete loss for words. Kei is at a loss.

 

The thing is, Kuroo has never been good at asking for help. Kei knows this. When Kuroo was still in high school and struggling through a catastrophe of emotions so strong it blew him right out of Tokyo. When Kuroo looked at every grand piano like he wanted to fold himself into the keys embedded in the cove of its body. When Kuroo played hide and seek alone, barely twelve years old, and then forgot how to step back out into the light.

 

So Kuroo has never been good at asking for help, and Kei has always known this, but that doesn’t mean— That doesn’t mean Kei knows how to deal with it each time it crops up, because he doesn’t. His lungs are withering. It hurts.

 

Kneeling on the bed behind Kuroo, head adrift in the clouds somewhere far, far below, Kei reaches for him.

 

_“Don’t touch me.”_

 

Kuroo’s words are sharp, urgent. A part of Kei’s heart falls away.

 

Yet even now, even bruised and battered and probably seething with the pain he isn't letting into his expression, Kuroo senses the devastation he’s wrought. He doesn’t turn, just drops his head further, his beautiful horrible back curving like a cat’s.

 

“I’m sorry, it’s not what you think, it’s— it’s for your own good, Tsukki. I don’t want you to get caught up in all of this.” His voice wavers like a dead leaf in the wind. “Please.”

 

This is Kuroo at the bottom of a well, Kuroo with the curtains drawn tight around his moving-mountain heart. Kuroo on the losing side of a war.

 

Kei clears his throat, clears his mind. “Is it okay if it’s not direct skin-on-skin contact?”

 

A beat of tense, torn silence. “Yeah. I think so.”

 

Kei gets gloves.

 

☉

 

They don’t talk, at first. Kei dabs antiseptic onto the cuts as gently as he can; Kuroo clenches his jaw and holds his breath like he might die if he doesn’t. Every once in a while, he lets out a hiss of air that sounds like fire, and Kei is sorry with every hurt fiber of his being.

 

In a last-ditch effort to distract both of them, Kei asks about Kuroo’s wounds again. Kuroo sends everything sprawling into the gutter by ignoring him.

 

This annoys Kei more than it should. It annoys him so much, he asks again.

 

At this, Kuroo sighs, and Kei stops moving for a split-second, but it’s a sigh of resignation. A giving in.

 

“Y’know why they don’t let most divers, not even the experienced ones, come to the Upside Down?”

 

Kei shrugs. “No.”

 

“It’s perfectly harmless in the daytime, but after nightfall the monsters come out. They climb out of the sky and go creeping around the rope bridges and rooftops, looking for prey. If you’re caught outside a house, you’re fucked.”

 

As if this were some kind of twisted fairytale with the evil fairy godmother and the fire-breathing dragon and everything. Kei pulls on a clean pair of gloves. He reminds himself to breathe.

 

“I’m usually pretty good at not getting caught, but, well.” Kuroo laughs flatly. “Shit’s been happening.”

 

“And you can’t tell me what kind of shit, I assume?”

 

He laughs again, but softer. “You know me too well.”

 

Sometimes Kei wishes he didn’t. Sometimes Kei wished he’d met the boy who lived in the apartment block across the street instead of the one who fell out of the sky and then turned Tokyo into his personal snowstorm. The boy across the street would play volleyball with him until his last year of high school and help him out with all his math homework. The boy across the street would be up for movie marathons every week instead of every other month. The boy across the street would hide secrets like _I hate white chocolate_ and _I kissed my brother’s friend when I was fourteen_ in the too-big sleeves of his sweater for Kei to tease out in the dark of night, hands roaming everywhere, heart floating up into the sky. Smaller secrets; bite-sized and sugary sweet, so that even Kei would be able to hold onto them.

 

Maybe in another world, Kei learns to let go. Maybe in another world, Kuroo remembers where he came from before the whole convoluted mess of diving. Before he lost everything, and ten years, and more.

 

Not in this one. Kei finishes applying the bandages on his back, and then gets off the bed. Kuroo doesn’t move. But Kei doesn’t, either.

 

“Your hands.”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“Show me your hands.”

 

A deer-in-the-headlights look passes like quicksilver across Kuroo’s face. His lips quirk upwards, just barely. This smile is intentionally pained.

 

“You don’t want to see them.”

 

Kei narrows his eyes. “I do.”

 

After a moment, Kuroo holds out his hands, palms up for the world to alight on them. Palms up, bitten, bleeding.

 

Kei kneels on the floor in front of him, and tries not to cry.

 

☉

 

When Kuroo is twelve years old, POOLS finds him in the middle of nowhere. He’s been diving from realm to realm for two years now, and he doesn’t have a single memory from before that. He can’t tell them anything, when they ask, except for his name and where he’s been (deserts, ochre galaxies, the ocean that smells like lavender), where he hasn't (home); even these small truths have to be gently coaxed out of him.

 

When Kuroo is twelve years old, he is terrified. He moves and acts and breathes like a feral cat, like he’s convinced he’ll have to make a run for it at any moment. Like someone’s tried to cut off his tail one too many times. Maybe someone has tried to cut his tail off before. Most likely, someone has.

 

This would explain why Kuroo never talks about the crooked pinky finger on his left hand, the one that never moves no matter how hard he’s tap-tap-tapping his fingers against the table or the wall or the ceiling. This would explain one thing.

 

Not the rest, but at least this. At least Kei has this, a rudimentary understanding of Kuroo Tetsurou, who needs to be tied down to Tokyo with promises of coffee and sour candy, long train rides to the outskirts of the city. Who needs someone to hold his hand.

 

Kuroo needs someone.

 

Kei hopes it’s him. Kei never says this, but he hopes it’s him.

 

☉

 

Afterwards, Kei heads to the bathroom in the darkened hallway to clean up.

 

When he leaves the room, Kuroo is still sitting on the edge of the bed, examining his mummified hands with detached interest. But as Kei steps out of the bathroom, drying his hands on his pants, Kuroo is there, too, the bare skin of his shoulder pressed against the wall.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says.

 

Kei makes to brush past him, but the hallway is narrow, and Kuroo is built like a heartbreaker, so Kei can’t bring himself to push him aside. He stops in front of Kuroo, stares at the floor.

 

“A ‘thank you’ would’ve been fine,” Kei says, not quite coldly. Kuroo’s red sneakers look like they’ve seen much better days. They’re mud-stained and scuffed and the color is peeling in some places, shoelaces tangled in a series of increasingly desperate knots. “I’m the one who pushed you away first, anyway.”

 

Kei’s had a lot of time to think about the events that took place under the midnight streetlight. Maybe too much, really. So much that the hurt in Kuroo’s eyes has vanished and edged itself sideways into all the ladder-spaces between Kei’s rib cage, settled in like a disease.

 

Kei’s had a lot of time to think about the events that took place that day. Enough that he’s realized that everything was wrong, from the angle of their too-small shadows, to the color of the sky, to the color of their hearts. Everything was marred and mottled with anger and frustration, glazed over with the incendiary texture of youth. It's a miracle they kept it together that long to begin with.

 

When Kei finally lifts his head, Kuroo is staring at him like a revelation.

 

“Shit,” he manages, all bright-eyed and beautiful, and Kei hates how he can’t look away anymore. Kuroo is brilliant like a firework display. He always has been.

 

“Shit,” Kuroo repeats. “Listen, Tsukki—” He slides the back of his bandaged hand over his hair, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “I wasn’t mad at you that day.”

 

Kei’s immediate eight year-old reflex is to not believe a word that Kuroo is saying. Kuroo is very good at lying. It is only one of his many talents.

 

“I don’t believe you,” he tells him, because he doesn’t.

 

“I was never mad,” Kuroo says, his voice going all breathy and brittle. “I swear to all the gods in every world, Tsukki, it wasn’t your fault.”

 

Kei watches the shoelace-knots come undone in Kuroo’s perfectly proportioned Renaissance painting face. There’s a feeling in his chest, one which he doesn’t know the name for yet. One which has been here for a long, long time.

 

His reply is nothing but a whisper, the timbre of his voice just cresting above the splintered sounds of the night.

 

“Then why?”

 

And then Kuroo is leaning in, dipping forward, upwards, close enough that their noses are a mere daydream away from brushing. He exhales like he’s trying to push the weight of the whole universe off his shoulders. He exhales, and Kei feels the warmth on his face, his fire-singed skin.

 

He watches Kei, and Kei forgets how to be human.

 

“Because—”

 

The distance between them shrinks. Across oceans and deserts and mountains, across ragged roads with the signs all pointing in the wrong directions.

 

“Because—”

 

Kuroo’s eyelashes are unfairly long. Kuroo’s skin is the loveliest shade of sun-kissed warm. And Kuroo’s lips, Kuroo’s lips—

 

“Because—”

 

Kei braces himself, but before anything happens Kuroo’s stumbling backwards just as quick as he'd pressed in, pulling himself away with the kind of conscious effort that warrants torn skin, as if leaving Kei hanging in midair with hope tattooed across his cheeks physically hurts him.

 

It doesn’t matter if it hurts. He does it anyway. Kuroo is back to looking like a tragedy, back to hands-behind-back and smooth, seamless smiles, the backlit apocalypse bled right out of him. Already the shoelace knots are coming back into themselves, the walls going up around Kuroo’s expression, caging all that untamed beauty in. Putting it on a tightrope, putting it out of reach.

 

Kuroo turns his face to the side, unseeing. Even now, he is beautiful, jewel-studded jawline and soft lips and all. Even in his cruelty, he is monumental.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

Kei takes off the red bomber and drops it at Kuroo’s feet. Then he goes back to the empty bedroom with the empty bed, Kuroo’s shadow still cast across the crumpled sheets. Kuroo’s ghost, still here.

 

☉

 

_Local Tokyo boy meets estranged best friend in an unfamiliar land: too bad for him, it’s all fucking real!_

 

In the morning the skies are clear again, the rope-and-wooden-plank bridges outside devoid of life and swaying gently in the breeze. There’s something lingering on in the quiet, something shaped a little like longing.

 

Kuroo’s tacky red bomber jacket is folded neatly at the foot of the bed. Kei picks it up, shakes it out. A _get well soon_ card tumbles out, falling open on the floor with its insides burning up in the light.

 

_Go home, Tsukishima._

 

Kei’s immediate, eight year-old instinct is to throw the card and the bomber and then himself out of the window, which Kuroo must have climbed out of, as it is unlatched and creaking with every gust of wind that blows in. But he doesn’t. Kei’s immediate instincts have brought him nothing good of late.

 

He throws the jacket over his shoulders again, puts the card in his waterproof backpack, and heads out. He goes back into the room with the swimming pool. He goes diving.

 

Everything smells like sweet persimmons now, but Kei can’t quite bring himself to hold his breath.

 

☉

 

_“I’d go and pick you up, and then drag your stupid head of hair back to Tokyo with me.”_

 

_“Aww, Tsukki, I’m flattered.”_

 

_“But— only if you asked.”_

 

_“Oho? Why do you say that?”_

 

_“‘Cause you’re an idiot, and you don’t always tell me things.”_

 

_“And you want me to?”_

 

_“...Yeah. I want you to. It matters to me, sort of._

 

_You matter to me. Sort of.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> shoutout to early-august me for doing all the heavy lifting because finals are approaching hella fuckin fast and i'm about to die. i've got chapter 8 drafted. the rest of me is lost amidst cold war history and the age of iron  
> anyway term break's finally here for us lmao so i'm gonna go mug my ass off or something. maybe. hopefully. also yes i too cannot believe that i dragged kuroo into the main story just to have him run out on us again. really?? after i wrote this chapter i had to sit back and ask myself that too. really?????? well he'll be back pretty fuckin soon anyway so i hope you guys don't hate my stupid ass too much lmao. i might do another double update next week since term break and all- we'll see i guess??? i mean on the assumption that there are people following this thing, honestly i have no idea what the fuck i'm doing. but ok. i'mma go. see y'all when i see y'all  
> thank you from the bottom of my whole ass heart for reading, especially if you’ve made it this far. legit you are lit af. all kudos, comments, bookmarks, and miscellaneous rocks are deeply appreciated
> 
> have a good one


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kei pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, frowning. He straightens his back, turns his frown on Ushijima, who is still wearing that impassive great-weather-isn’t-it-world’s-ending-too-but-whatever expression.
> 
> “I don’t get it.”

“You’re in love with him.”

 

Hinata’s voice is quiet when he says this, his eyes as cold as sunshine on the frozen surface of a lake, the summer seeping like fresh blood out of his smile. It is not summer anymore. Fall has begun its languid pilgrimage across the horizon of the globe, dyeing all the gingko leaves mustard yellow. The interior of The Caged Bird is gentle with the muted glow of the afternoon.

 

The realization makes Hinata look older than seventeen. Which isn’t fair, because he deserves to be stupid, stupidly seventeen, even if Kei has already lost touch with the songbirds of his own youth. Even if Kei feels the distance still, like a broken rib, punched gently into his chest.

 

Kei tries to put the notion away. Turns the page of his additional mathematics textbook, gaze resting blankly on the strings of equations, the clumpy stick figures. Unseeing.

 

“You’re in love with him.”

 

Kei can’t say anything, so he doesn’t. Hinata refills his coffee, and walks away.

 

☉

 

When Kei opens his eyes, there is a man wearing possibly the most serious expression Kei has ever seen in his life looking down at him. More specifically, he is standing over Kei and turning his gaze downwards, and doing nothing much else. His hands are folded neatly behind his back.

 

The stranger is wearing casual clothes, the sort you’d see on the weekend streets of Tokyo, and his hair is parted neatly to the side. His stoic expression flickers minutely.

 

“Welcome to Hakoguni,” he declares in a rich, deep voice that reminds Kei of gravel and cinnamon crunch granola, the brand they sell at every _konbini_ in the city. Surprisingly— and yet unsurprisingly— formal.

 

Kei slowly picks himself off the ground and reaches out to take the hand that has been proffered to him. The stranger’s grip is firm. Reassuring.

 

“I’m Tsukishima,” he says politely.

 

“I know,” the man replies. “You can call me Ushijima.”

 

Kei wants to ask what he means by _I know,_ but Ushijima continues talking right on after that. Ushijima seems to exist on a different plane altogether, his grasp on the inner workings of the universe just that little bit sounder, that little bit steadier. This is news to Kei, who is quite used to being on top of things. Or, at least, he had _once_ been quite on top of things. The past week has been an adventure in untying his shoelaces and head-butting the ground in various iterations of pure shock. The past week has been an adventure; a journey, of the life-changing sort.

 

He holds his tongue, and listens.

 

“Hakoguni consists of an intricate framework of boxes, constructed millennia ago by the residents who grew tired of seeing each other’s faces all the time. As a result, you will find that every box has a rather distinctive personality, reflective of its original inhabitants. Over the years, these effects have faded, and now visitors will often find their own memories, desires, and fears reflected in their surroundings as they travel between boxes.”

 

The words sound rehearsed. Like they’ve been repeated so many times over the course of history that they blur together at some points, coagulating into something bigger than themselves. Ushijima isn’t quite bored (Kei doesn't think he is capable of boredom, to be frank), but his voice is monotone, his expression stoic. Kei’s attention flickers like a dying lightbulb.

 

“That is why I am here,” Ushijima concludes, finally, and only now does a sliver of emotion work its way into his impassivity. “To guide travelers through this realm and prevent any unnecessary deaths.”

 

Kei raises his eyebrows. “What about necessary deaths?”

 

Ushijima’s lips quirk upwards faintly. “We will see about that, Tsukishima-who-should-not-be-here Kei. We will see.”

 

With that, Ushijima strides forward with perfect poise and posture, arms swinging, and disappears into a hole in the wall that Kei had _not_ noticed. At all.

 

☉

 

On the matter of walls— if there were an interior design magazine solely dedicated to displaying wallpaper and other vertically-inclined decor, then this place would be on the front cover of every issue. And if not, then Kei would personally advocate for it to happen. Cold, heartless Kei would do it.

 

Hakoguni has many, many box compartments, he discovers. Each is covered from floor-to-ceiling in abstractions of pure art. In one there are sloping ocean waves painted in fifteen shades of deep blue and frothing at the tips, the detailing and texturing so meticulously done that each wave look like it might leap right off the walls. In another, there are cats, lean and lithe and bounding across the rooftops etched into the sunflower-yellow walls. A third features a peacock pinned on the square ceiling above them, its feathers draping down the sides and onto the emerald green flooring.

 

It is pure magic. Hakoguni is surreal, and yet so vividly loud in its presentation that at the same time Kei can’t imagine it as anything _but_ real. All these miracles, preserved like resin molds in the enclosed walls. All these miracles, hiding from themselves.

 

They’ve just stepped into a box that smells like a summer festival, when Ushijima freezes.

 

“Do you hear that?”

 

Kei listens. “No.”

 

“There— again.”

 

This time Kei catches it, the sound of bells jingling; unpleasant. “I hear it,” he tells Ushijima.

 

“That’s the other reason I’m here,” Ushijima says, relatively matter-of-fact. Already he is ducking into a small hole in the wall, the unspoken words _follow me_ whistling behind him like a ward against evil.

 

“To keep you away from that thing.”

 

☉

 

When Kei is fifteen, he breaks a lot of things. Like promises to be a good kid, and the law, and the hinges of a big shiny door that should really not be taken off under any circumstances.

 

(For the record, he didn’t ask to be a part of this.)

 

This is how it goes: Kuroo announces that he wants to break into a supermarket one afternoon in August, collapsed in a tangle of long limbs on Kei’s bed. The UFO-patterned blanket is in the wash today. A shapeless white lump occupies its usual spot; Kuroo jumps and lands neatly on top, still wearing his wrinkled school uniform and those socks with the tasteless green stripes.

 

After a harrowing few weeks of suspense, summer has finally hit its peak. Tokyo is officially so hot, you could crack an egg open on the sidewalk and get a nice sunny side-up out of the whole ordeal. Gordon Ramsay would probably be equal parts pleased and horrified. Kei is mainly horrified.

 

But anyway, it’s hot, and they’re not doing anything _because_ it’s hot, so Kuroo announces that he wants to break into a supermarket.

 

In the interest of the uninitiated and uninformed, perhaps it would be wise to talk first about the matter of Kuroo’s impossibly long, and therefore _impossible to finish_ bucket list. The idea came to him in a prophetic dream when he was fourteen. Kei told him he was going to get himself killed, Kuroo ignored him like he always does, and then at sixteen, he and Bokuto snuck an entire living, flapping penguin into the local swimming complex, perfectly innocuous flippers and waddle-gait and all.

 

It didn’t end well, but in the words of Hinata, who had at the time been an even younger, even more sprightly fourteen year old, it certainly did something for their reputations. Bokuto got an upgrade from human bulldozer to human bulldozer with otherworldly penguin communication skills, and a knack for scaling fences not meant to be scaled.

 

And Kuroo, Kuroo made a new name for himself. Kei could tell it pleased him greatly, to be something other than _the boy who came from the stars,_ the errant astronaut. Kei could tell, which is why he said _the penguin looked quite happy_ instead of _you’re a dumbass and I don’t know why I put up with our friendship_ when Kuroo had appeared, soaked to the bone and grinning like a fool on his doorstep shortly after the incident.

 

So anyway, Kuroo has a bucket list. Kei doesn’t remember there being anything about breaking into supermarkets mixed in amidst all the lawless mayhem, but apparently now there is.

 

Naturally, Kei thinks it’s a disastrous idea, like all of Kuroo’s other ideas; he doesn’t want anything to do with it. Absolutely nothing. Kei thinks Kuroo should spend more time thinking and less time trying to get himself removed from Tokyo. He informs Kuroo as much.

 

Just as naturally, Kuroo doesn’t give a shit. He takes all that reckless charm of his, the ocean sunshine and windblown hair, and throws it wholesale in Kei’s face. And look at that, look at those melted butter eyes, look at that apocalyptic smile. Even his ugly mismatched socks, one tastelessly striped in green and the other covered in polka dots, cannot make him any less spectacular. Even the childish, teasing look in his eyes cannot lessen the gravity of him.

 

Poor, poor Kei. Fifteen years old and already this far gone.

 

“How about,” Kuroo whistles cheerfully, stalling for time he knows he doesn’t need. “Tomorrow night?”

 

Kei will not look at him. Kei refuses to look at his sly pretty-boy face. Kei refuses so hard, he refuses himself right out of his room and across the hallway into the kitchen, where he opens the fridge and stands there getting blasted by cold air for three minutes.

 

Poor, poor Kei.

 

☉

 

For the record, Kei didn’t ask to be a part of this. It is one hundred percent Kuroo’s fault that Kei is out past his curfew, and when they inevitably get caught he is going to tell the officers exactly that. Police officers are scary, even if Kei is taller than most of them. A lot of things in the world are scary when you are fifteen. He can’t help it.

 

But Kei frees up _tomorrow night,_ because the thought of Kuroo standing by himself in the middle of an empty supermarket is equal parts funny and sad, depending on which angle you look at it from. Kei knows most of the angles you can look at Kuroo Tetsurou from; half of them would break your heart.

 

Kuroo saunters across the ghostly-lit streets a minute later, tugging at the collar of his shirt and making some offhand comment about the weather at midnight, how it’s a whole new kind of bad. The action reveals a bit of moonlit collarbone, just for a second. Kei’s heart does a neat little backflip.

 

_Hey,_ he says, and Kei says _if we get caught_ and Kuroo says _we won’t._ He’s got this grin on like he’s going to set off fireworks in someone’s basement and he isn’t going to regret it in the slightest. He’s got this grin on like he knows about everything in the whole wide universe, and he's going to share all of it with Kei.

 

Kei is in mild disbelief because Kuroo somehow procured a huge hammer and nails in about six different sizes, Cheshire cat Kuroo figured out how to unscrew the hinges off a door. They get in without a hitch. Kei is in massive, massive disbelief.

 

But anyway, here’s how it goes. They break into a supermarket, a gigantic _Tokyu_ with the never-ending candy aisles and spices organized by name and that one brand of granola that’s sold everywhere. It’s dark, but Kuroo. It should be weird, but Kuroo.

 

While Kei is distracted staring at the familiar-but-unfamiliar array of cakes and puddings, Kuroo discovers the cleaning aisle. He returns, dragging four twelve-packs of toilet rolls behind him, drops them in front of Kei, and grins.

 

“We’re gonna build a fort.”

 

“Out of toilet paper.”

 

“Yes.”

 

Although Kei is deeply skeptical of all things shaped like a Kuroo-brand idea, they actually do build a fort, and it’s just enough bizarre and childish for him to admit that he likes it a little. It’s just enough for a lanky, catlike seventeen year-old and his lankier, grumpier middle school friend. Kuroo grabs Pocari and weird grape sodas with Jell-o in them and Kei figures out a way to get to the strawberry shortcake, and then they lean back in their tiny makeshift castle and stare at the ceiling. The darkness of it; how it folds over them, blanket-like.

 

“Hey, Tsukki,” Kuroo starts out of the pleasantly pink silence. He hasn’t told Kei about his horrible fucked-up plan to quit high school and start diving again, so there’s nothing Kei has to forgive him for yet. They’re still unguarded, still kind to each other. In the muddled light his hands are still for once, pianist’s fingers wrapped around a condensation-covered bottle, draped over his knee. At peace.

 

Kei hums, says he’s listening.

 

Kuroo sips at his soda thoughtfully. “Do you like Tokyo?”

 

It’s a very sudden question. Kei has to think about it. He lets his thoughts wander from the ash-colored skies to the snow-dusted streets, the jingle of Family Mart _konbini_ when you step in like a stranger seeking shelter from the dark, the way the morning casts turquoise lights across the dappled interiors of train carriages. And then, unbidden, he thinks about other realms and galaxies, with magic and mystery and comets. Shooting stars. The only part of the past Kuroo will share with him.

 

“Yeah,” Kei replies.

 

A pause. The sound of plastic forks scraping against something, of soda bubbles.

 

“Enough to stay here forever?”

 

“I don’t know. What kind of question is that?”

 

“An honest one.”

 

Kuroo smiles, and it’s stupid and silly and just warm enough for Kei to kind of want to touch it. To run his fingers down his face, to get a feel for that stupid bird’s nest hair, to find out the cadence of him up close.

 

Kuroo smiles, and there’s something like hope in his eyes. But Kei’s not sure enough to draw it into words— he never is. Kuroo keeps too much of himself under wraps, gorgeous gift-wrapping paper covered in UFO’s and the pawprints of cats, so Kei’s never sure.

 

Still, the light in his eyes stays, twinkling.

 

“I think so,” Kei allows. Is this the response that will send Kuroo running right back into the blanket fortress of his heart? Kei wonders.

 

Kei wonders, and looks over at him, and discovers that he is wrong.

 

“I’m glad,” Kuroo says, smaller than a whisper, lighter than the morning sky. “I’m glad.”

 

☉

 

Ushijima refuses to call the thing, the _disturbance_ in Hakoguni a monster. It’s a spirit, he claims. A neutral entity, perfectly valid in its existence.

 

“Perfectly valid for it to eat us both too, I presume,” Kei says dryly. As far as neutrality goes, this is not what he had in mind.

 

“It will not swallow us,” Ushijima counters, stubborn and stubbornly calm, “If we avoid meeting it.”

 

“I see.” Kei does not see. What he _does_ see is that the air around them had turned sour the moment the bells began to ring, that neutrality does not correspond with damage dealt out, and that Ushijima is a weird fucking guy.

 

An exceptionally weird fucking guy, but Kei has to put that aside for a moment.

 

“Have you seen someone a bit shorter than me, with black hair that sticks up all over the place and covers one eye?” And then, because he knows this too now, he adds, “He’s wearing a black shirt. And red sneakers.”

 

Ushijima pauses behind the teacher’s desk. They’re in a box modeled like a classroom, and the harder Kei looks the more it begins to resemble the one from his middle school memories— the blackboard spanning the length of the far wall, the crooked Seiko clock that’s just a minute slow, the metal chairs with their little curved hooks for hanging your backpack on. Kei runs his hands over the bumpy surface of a desk, the rough characters carved into the thick plastic. He remembers these words.

 

“I met a person like that once, but he wasn’t quite as tall as you described.”

 

“What do you mean?” If there is a Kuroo-lookalike traipsing around the place, Kei wants to see him.

 

“The person with unruly hair I met was a child.” Ushijima gives Kei a strange look. “He looked no more than eleven years old at most.”

 

They’ve stopped walking inside a box shaped like a memory from a childhood and a half ago. Kei still remembers the quiet lunch break chatter, the dent in the wall from when someone threw a ball too hard, the stories of faraway lands and fantastical things. There’s a piece of chalk on the blackboard ledge.

 

The boy who came from the stars has always been a repository for timeless stories, but he himself is no perennial. Ushijima is not finished just yet.

 

“If I am not wrong, he said his name was Kuroo.”

 

Somewhere far from home, a forgotten realm shivers.

 

☉

 

“You’re in love with him.”

 

Kei is standing quite innocently at the red light intersection outside of POOLS’ home base one day, school bag slung over one shoulder, when Oikawa tells him this. Kei has been standing here quite innocently for a while now; Oikawa is the one who appears out of the sheer blue moon of the evening, sipping Arizona green tea from a can with a Post-it on it.

 

It’s hardly an appropriate substitute for a greeting, no matter the fact that this is Oikawa Tooru, who enjoys leading Iwaizumi on wild goose chases across the entire galaxy, wearing tank tops with hideous neon prints on them no matter the time of the year, and meticulously labeling all of his stuff before he puts it in the communal fridge on the fortieth floor. No matter that— Kei is caught horribly off guard anyway. This is not the kind of greeting one starts a conversation with anyway.

 

“Good evening, Oikawa,” he says. If you asked a bystander, they would say his voice sounded tight, all of his seventeen years pressed like a handprint into his caved-in chest. But no one asks the bystander, so Kei wants to say he sounds all right. Measured. Collected.

 

“Good evening, young lovesick Tsukishima,” Oikawa returns cheerfully.

 

Kei rolls his eyes, irritation making the gesture bigger than it has to be. He regrets it immediately; Oikawa, with his laser beam robot eyes, will definitely pick up on that. Kei has faith in his alien ancestry.

 

Kei rolls his eyes, and then regrets doing so immediately. “I am not in love with anyone.”

 

At this, Oikawa nods, very serious. “And tonight, a meteor will crash into the earth, annihilating Tokyo and everything in it. I swear by this.”

 

“I don’t swear by anything. I prefer to adapt to the situation as it goes.”

 

“What are you gonna do if he doesn’t come back one day?” Non-sequitur, but also not.

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kei does.

 

Oikawa smiles at this, small and slow. He knows that Kei knows. Kei knows that he knows that Kei knows. Everyone knows what everyone knows, which is what Kei wants to un-know, which is what Kei wants to ignore. Kei is very good at ignoring things.

 

So Oikawa smiles, but it is not cruel. Oikawa is never cruel, except to himself.

 

“We live in a bullet train age, Tsukishima. Everything comes and goes so fast, you won’t even realize what’s gone until it’s miles and miles behind you. I’m telling you this as a friend _and_ as the Arizona green tea guy— be honest with yourself. It’s the least you can do.”

 

See, the thing about Oikawa is that he spends most of his time being a waste of oxygen alongside the other wastes of oxygen, such as Bokuto and Kuroo. But sometimes, and only sometimes, he gets too buzzed on pumpkin spice lattes purchased off Starbucks gift card apologies from Iwaizumi and then says something so wise, you could put it in one of those inspirational quote albums on Facebook that all the middle-aged moms love. It’s like getting life advice from a praying mantis, only the praying mantis really, really knows his shit.

 

Kei wishes Oikawa didn’t know his shit so well.

 

“I don’t like trains,” he tells him, instead, and when the green man returns from his trip around the sun, Kei is the one who steps out onto the road first, because Kei’s mind might be neat and logical and the opposite of nonsensical, but it is no match for Kei’s heart, which is a fragile, fleeting thing.

 

Arizona green tea never tasted much like anything anyway. Oikawa sees him off with a wave of his hand. It’s not quite accusatory, but not quite carefree either.

 

☉

 

When Kei is fifteen, he lets Kuroo talk him into breaking into a supermarket, not because he is particularly fond of supermarkets, but because it is Kuroo who asks.

 

He is still too young to comprehend the literary value of wishing to turn someone into a constellation. He is still young. Nonetheless, or perhaps exactly because of that uncertainty, the darkness of the unlit supermarket aisles is immortalized in his heart, profoundly bright and beautiful. Toilet paper fortresses and grape sodas with Jell-o; strange questions and stranger shades of hope, hidden beneath eyes forever lidded at half-mast. This is how Kuroo Tetsurou gets under his skin without him realizing it, and then stays there.

 

Have you seen this boy? He brings the world to his knees when he smiles that apocalyptic smile.

 

Have you seen this boy? He doesn’t play the piano but his hands remember the shape of every key. He doesn’t love himself, but he probably could.

 

Oh, the heart of him. The heart of him.

 

☉

 

It turns out Ushijima’s stubbornness is somewhat justified after all, because in the decade that's passed since he settled here, not a single charge has fallen prey to the monster. (Kei will continue to call it a monster for as long as he lives. The sound of bells will not quite go away, no matter how hard he tries to make it.)

 

Later, out of genuine curiosity, because this is as distant a place to be as any, Kei asks him how he ended up this job to begin with, and ends up getting slapped in the face with a slew of revelations.

 

Ushijima Wakatoshi, before abandoning his post to become Hakoguni’s resident guide, was once the most proficient coda diver at POOLS. He was eighteen when he started diving, and still eighteen when he made permanent landfall here. There was an incident, apparently, and another missing person to add to the list. The sort that is missing only in name. The sort that doesn’t ever come back.

 

The casualty count _before_ Ushijima decided to say goodbye to Tokyo and cold Styrofoam cup coffees forever is clearly a different story. He doesn't give any more details after that, so Kei doesn't press further.

 

All of this was ten years ago.

 

“Oikawa was still an obnoxious child when I left,” Ushijima says, and there is a superficial note of annoyance in his voice, but also something warmer, something affectionate. “How is he these days?”

 

“Still annoying,” Kei replies, and then after a moment’s delay, “You don’t look that old.” He looks at the clean-shaven cut of Ushijima’s jaw, his smooth skin, the campfire light in his eyes. Those are not the eyes of a man a whole decade or so older than Oikawa Tooru, personal brand ambassador of Arizona green tea.

 

Ushijima nods. “I am not. Time passes differently in different realms, sometimes.”

 

Kei has to give the thought a few more seconds to sink in. “So when did you meet this Kuroo kid?”

 

“Maybe a month or two ago.”

 

Kei balks. “Are you sure.”

 

“My memory is perfect, as are my navigational skills, young Tsukishima.”

 

“The Kuroo I know is _twenty_.”

 

Ushijima’s eyebrows shoot up so high, they disappear into the shade of his bangs. A flash of confusion, and then his countenance stills, is inscrutable again.

 

He asks, “Have you heard of the stories where divers go missing?”

 

“Yes.” Kei can tell he is on the brink of something larger than this, bigger than mere missing persons lists on lobby signboards. Kei is impatient.

 

“There are different ways to lose the favor of the flow,” Ushijima continues, and again this is news to Kei. Everything is news to Kei, who has apparently been out of the loop of the entire world all his life. “Most commonly, divers lose their anchors.

 

But there are other causes too. For example: if you lose yourself.”

 

Kei pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, frowning. He straightens his back, turns his frown on Ushijima, who is still wearing that impassive great-weather-isn’t-it-world’s-ending-too-but-whatever expression.

 

“I don’t get it.”

 

Ushijima almost looks apologetic for a moment, but he turns away and begins striding purposefully into the next boxed-up room.

 

“For you and your friend’s sake, I hope you never have to.”

 

Kei still doesn’t get it.

 

☉

 

“You’re in love with him.”

 

Yamaguchi sounds sad. Yamaguchi sounds sad and Kei hates it the way he hates winter, which is too clean, and Kuroo, who is too close to the most well-hidden parts of Kei’s heart for him to let go of. No one should ever have to be this sad because of him.

 

“Who?” Kei asks innocently, stalling for time. Around them, Shibuya waxes and wanes in heartbeats, the neon signs blinking out seduction in Morse code, everyone on the streets hurriedly on their way to falling in love. Kei is still wearing his uniform, the collar stiff and uncomfortable around his neck. Yamaguchi is wearing whatever people who do the stupid useless realm-diving thing wear when they are not doing that.

 

The two of them stand outside the huge Starbucks that spans two floors, backs pressed against the foggy glass. It is cold out.

 

“You know who I’m talking about,” Yamaguchi replies, patient even in this endless cycle of non-confrontation. Ten years of friendship has made him strong in ways Kei cannot even dream of. Ten years of friendship— Yamaguchi always knows.

 

Kei shrugs. Stuffs his hands further into the pockets of his overcoat. “I do.”

 

That doesn’t mean he wants to know. Two months have elapsed in regret-hours since the night under the streetlight when Kei broke his brain-to-mouth filter and stomped it into the ground with his shoes, spilling loneliness disguised as anger everywhere. Since Kuroo left.

 

Oikawa told him it was just an especially, _especially_ long mission. Kei thinks he knows better.

 

“And?”

 

“And nothing.”

 

“Tsukki.”

 

“It sure is cold tonight.”

 

“ _Tsukishima Kei_ , my tallest and wisest friend.”

 

Kei shifts so that his shoulder is to the glass behind him. He stares at Yamaguchi, who stares right back. Somber.

 

“Yamaguchi Tadashi, my dearest and most ridiculously freckled friend.”

 

Yamaguchi laughs that shy, sweet laugh of his that used to make all the girls and boys in class trip over their shoelaces in an effort to stay upright. It is the kind of laugh that asks, very humbly, to be listened to. Kei listens

 

“Okay, okay, I get it. You’re not gonna tell me anything unless you decide to yourself. But I’ll wait, yeah? I’ll wait for you. Take your time. You’re tall, after all, so you can do that.”

 

Having said whatever it is he had wanted to say, Yamaguchi steps away from the Starbucks, inclining his head in the direction of the train station. His cheeks are dusted pink from the cold, and his eyes are warm, and Kei is grateful, beneath all the words he cannot quite say.

 

“I don’t know how being tall has to do with anything, but sure.”

 

And then Kei starts after him, down the gilded streets of their childhood. Not on the brink of a discovery yet, but almost there. Almost there.

 

☉

 

When Kei is eight, he almost drowns. Spaghetti limbs and yarn-spool heart, unwinding at the bottom of the community pool to the soundtrack of a disconnected ballad. A piano, calling to him from far, far away.

 

When Kuroo is twelve, he is found again. By tall, towering adults in dark suits, by Tokyo in all its glitz and glory, by Kei. He had been floating along the bottom of a very big swimming pool for two years, pushing three, and now he has been lifted out of the water. Twisted like a bad joke, with cold, half-lidded eyes that don’t know how to look at anything without trying to burn it down. Cruel, in that way that only people who have known too much cruelty can be.

 

But Kei coaxes the apocalyptic smile right out of him. He, in turn, taunts the color right into Kei’s cheeks. They are strangely complementary to each other, never mind that Kuroo doesn’t remember what his parents look like and sometimes cries out in the dark of night, causing knife-wounds to bloom in Kei’s chest. Never mind that the piano never quite stops playing its song, even though no one really wants to listen.

 

There are stories, folded into leather-bound books in POOLS’ archives, which Kei knows, better than evil smiling boogeymen and the rules of hide and seek. Stories about things like dinosaurs, and interplanetary civil wars that have lasted for millennia, and ghosts. Stories which are as real as the morning news, as false as the winding waterways of Mars.

 

But there has never been a story like this. Think about that.

 

_Once upon a time, there were two boys. Two boys, two realms; an old, sad song on the radio. Then one disappeared, so the other left on a journey to find him. A journey of the life-changing sort._

 

_Once upon a time, there were two boys._

 

Why did the other boy chase after him? Why did he choose the hard road, the path through the woods with the fire-breathing dragons, the poison-tipped tree branches? Why, why, why?

 

It’s only been ~~eight years~~ a lifetime.

 

Kei’s finally found his answer.

 

☉

 

_Candidate name: Tsukishima Kei_

 

_Question 3:_

_Why do you keep lying to yourself about your feelings?_

 

_Answer:_

~~_I don’t have feelings for anyone._ ~~

_I’ll get back to you later._

 

☉

 

Kei isn’t even remotely surprised when the monster finds them.

 

Its arrival is preceded first by the ominous singsong echo of bells. Soon after, the walls around them begin to tremble quite noticeably. The Halloween story catches up to them when Ushijima and Kei are waist-deep in a literal boxed-up ocean, the clear blue water sloshing around them in protest as they do their utmost to move with efficiency. Both of them fail, because the boxed-up ocean comes with all the surging currents and whirlpool waves while still suspiciously resembling the community pool near Kei’s house. It drives a sharp needle of unease into his heart.

 

“This is not supposed to happen,” Ushijima says, sounding confidently unconfident, because apparently Ushijima cannot appear as anything but confident, even when he is wrong. “The spirit is supposed to stay away from us now that I've put up all the wards. It has never come this close before.” He almost sounds offended, which makes Kei want to laugh amidst all the daunting dangers of their present reality.

 

Because Kei is not surprised, not in the slightest. Ushijima’s words have stayed with him since their last trickle of conversation a few box-rooms down, sunk into the trenches of his mind and joined the fray of conversation ongoing at the back of it. Ushijima had said he hoped Kei would never have to understand, but already Kei is beginning to feel the cold hands of realization closing around his throat.

 

There are a number of things about Kuroo Tetsurou that no one can make out. Call him Mad Hatter, moon-reflection, astronaut from the stars with the Cheshire Cat eyes; Kuroo has always been a little blurred around the edges, as if the world didn’t quite know how to keep him in its grip, as if he might cut a hole in the sky and then step right through it one day.

 

And yet in spite of it all, Kei has had eight years with him. Somewhere along the way, Kuroo learned how to compensate for the blue of his tap-tap-tapping fingers. Somewhere along the way, Kuroo grew up.

 

The monster of Hakoguni lowers itself into the water, a whole three feet’s worth of garish, rust-red skin. It is a walking museum of forgotten items— there is a deflated bicycle wheel embedded in its shoulder, a splintered windchime jutting from one knobby, crooked knee, faded _Koinobori_ wallpapered all over its spindly, glass marble-covered arms. It has the face of a _daruma_ doll, only neither eye is painted in. Empty white sockets, empty gaze.

 

So, all right, Kei has had eight years with Kuroo. But he had ten more before that too, even if they are now fuzzy and covered in static the way your hands emerge from the craft box kissed with glitter.

 

Kuroo has nothing. _If you lose yourself._

 

Kuroo has nothing beneath those eight years, and Kei silently curses himself for thinking Kuroo was safely tethered to the ground when he’d spent so many summer afternoons looking out of the window instead of annoying Kei like he usually did. Ushijima’s words continue looping in Kei’s head, even as the real Ushijima tells him urgently to leave.

 

The monster of Hakoguni is closer now, wading like a faulty wind-up toy with a crick in its neck towards them.

 

“Tsukishima, you need to go.” Ushijima’s voice finally reaches him.

 

He doesn’t know when it happened, but the waters have risen high enough to begin lapping at his chin hungrily. Ushijima is sort of far away, like a dream; the monster is further. His shoulders feel unnaturally light. He has dropped his waterproof backpack, energy bars and flaky congratulatory cards and all.

 

To be frank, Kei still has an entire book’s worth of things to ask Ushijima, who seems to exist on a different plane altogether and possesses an incredible grasp on the inner workings of the universe. Ushijima has lost things before, which makes him wise. Ushijima has also seen a small Kuroo in the past, no more than eleven years old. What did that Kuroo look like? Was he sharp and full of rubbery smiles like a predatory cat with an arrow in its leg? Did he look at you the way he looked at the rest of the world, from the other end of a very long telescope? Was he lonely?

 

Kei wants to sit in a nice box-room that smells like his childhood with Ushijima, who is wise and therefore knows things, and talk until the late evening in useless Tokyo time. But the monster, the strain in Ushijima’s otherwise unruffled expression, and the creeping waters tell him what he needs to know.

 

_You need to go._

 

“Thank you, Ushijima,” Kei yells across the room, hoping that he sounds at least half as appreciative as he is feeling inside. Ushijima, who has produced a stack of paper charms bound with twine, nods back at him. Ever serious, ever stoic.

 

Then Kei holds his breath, ducks his head underwater, and dives.

 

☉

 

_“But what if I don’t want to tell you when I’m lost?”_

_“Then I’m never walking to the_ konbini _with you ever again.”_

_“So mean, Tsukki… Fine. I’ll ask. If I really can't get back.”_

_“Promise?”_

_“You know I don't like promises.”_

_“You know I don't like it when you bug me at like two in the morning with your weird philosophical worries.”_

_“All right, I promise.”_

_“Okay. Good night then.”_

_“Huh? That's it?”_

_“For what it's worth, I hope you never end up like those planetes, and I never have to remember this dumb conversation. So yes, that's it.”_

_~~“I hope I never end up like that too.”~~ _

_“Hmm?”_

_“Nothing! Good night, Tsukki.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> USHIJIMA. I ALWAYS WANTED TO TRY WRITING HIM  
> heyyyyyysup we're on term break which is otherwise known as Extended Study Break but anyway before i delve wholeheartedly into the Great Big Mess that is my ridiculous subject combination where all i do is write essays, let me leave you guys with an early update. i finished chapter 9 earlier on in the day so in terms of writing speed i'm just one chapter away from my endgame, and you guys are now one chapter closer too! cool shit  
> as always, thank you from the bottom of my cold dead heart for reading! all kudos, comments, and bookmarks are deeply appreciated, but as always comments make me cry 3.5 times as hard. i'm going to go back to hibernating now. see you guys on thursday
> 
> have a good one


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tokyo is not quite Tokyo without Kuroo in it.

All the coffee machines in Tokyo are still broken. It’s the first thing Kei checks for when he walks into a  _ konbini  _ on the softly-shimmering streets of Omotesando. Are the coffee machines still broken, is the student promotion for Pentel brush pens still ongoing, are all the office workers and high schoolers who look like potential models for The Scream (1893) still walking around with Styrofoam cups full of ice.

 

The answer, the clear light of early morning tells him, is yes. The world has not left him behind yet.

  
Anyway, it’s getting late, and the coffee’s cold, so Kei walks back out onto the street and tilts his head towards the cardboard sky. Holds back a shiver, because he had not expected nor hoped to be spit out of a bathroom sink, but it had happened anyway. Tokyo, built from the bare-bones of all their bright young dreams, lighthouse in the night for seafarers, breathes in shaky inhales and exhales around him. Winter has not let go of the city just yet.

 

He makes a pit-stop at Dominique Ansel Bakery, since he’s in the area, exits with raspberry lychee Cronuts and strawberry-flavored cakes, and then heads for home base.

  
  


☉

  
  


The coffee machines are still broken. Bokuto tells him this on the fortieth floor of POOLS, perched, owl-like, on the rim of the diamond pool. The coffee machines are still broken, which means everyone is twice as prickly as usual, and Bokuto is twice as loud. It is Sunday, the rest either away on missions or sleeping off hangovers as formidable as the Tokyo Skytree.

 

It is Sunday. Bokuto is here getting in touch with his inner self by the edge of the diamond pool because he likes doing that kind of thing, his feet sending tiny ripples skittering across the water.

 

Tsukishima goes to put the desserts in the communal fridge, so Bokuto leaves his footprints on a towel and follows him out. He makes an appreciative noise when he sees the logo printed on the paper carrier.

 

And then: “That was a long ass three days.” Bokuto’s cubicle is closest to the fridge, for reasons. He hangs off the back of his swivel chair, chin pillowed on folded arms, and watches Kei with those sun-gold eyes. Intense, whether or not he means for them to be.

 

Kei makes a noncommittal noise.

 

“You were looking for that catlike guy, mm, what was he called again—”

 

“Kuroo.” It’s weird that Kei has to remind him of his partner-in-crime-for-literally-everything’s existence, but he doesn’t have the time right now to be concerned.

 

“—Yeah, that one! Did you find him?”

 

Kei offers a noncommittal shrug to match the noncommittal noise from earlier. A set of evasive actions, designed, in classic Kei fashion, to throw off any further inquiry.

 

Unfortunately for him, Bokuto has always been more perceptive than his bulldozer-loud voice lets on. This also makes him a lot harder to deter. Oikawa had likened him to the headlights of a car once, when he was drunk off his ass and clinging to Iwaizumi like the boy was made of stardust. What Oikawa meant to say was Bokuto hurt his precious eyeliner-lined eyes to look at in the dim, moody lighting of the bar, because he was so fucking  _ loud  _ in every sense of the word. What everyone else saw was the pink of Iwaizumi’s cheeks, the way his lower lip trembled with something like indignation, or maybe nervousness.

 

Oikawa says smart things sometimes. Mainly when he isn’t trying.

 

The one-liner about Bokuto and car headlights stays with Kei, because Bokuto Koutarou has a very peculiar inner wiring that means common sense and traffic rules both mean nothing to him; in exchange, he is inexplicably attuned to the most easily-misunderstood of all truths. Bokuto understands, fundamentally, what it is that makes people tick. Kei wants to call himself an exception to this rule, but the reality is that no one is safe from Bokuto. For better or for worse.

 

Like headlights in the darkness, Bokuto latches onto the small movements: the way Kei’s eyes drop to the floor, the way his hands wander into the pockets of his red bomber jacket. Bokuto latches on, and forces you to look up. Turns the narrow beam of the flashlight on the skeletons in your closet without even meaning to, and then compliments their bone structure while you stand in the half-light, incredulous.

 

He asks one more question. “Can I tell the rest?”

 

Kei’s heart lurches. “No,” he answers, and winces at how the sharpness of it cuts through the air, tearing the strange quality of the saturated morning in half.

 

“Please don’t,” he adds, more civil.

 

For a while, Bokuto looks at him without saying anything. Kei, too proud and young to yield to anyone regardless of how much more they know about the universe than him, merely looks back. He pushes the paper carrier to the back of the fridge, where it fits itself snugly between an assortment of canned coffees. He stands up.

 

“You’re not a kid anymore, are ya?” At this, Kei stops his detailed dissection of the faraway windowsill. Bokuto grins. It is very bright, much like getting showered with light in the basement of a dimly-lit bar. It is very bright, which is reassuring somehow, like how Bokuto can be counted on to be by the diamond pool even on a Sunday morning.

 

“I can’t tell you what to do now, but I wanna say this, so let me: wherever the hell you’re going, come back safely. With or without him.”

 

The panicked spluttering of Kei’s heart stills. He turns away before his self-control can give out and he ends up emptying his heart all over the floor, and makes a twirling beeline for the elevator.

 

“Please stop drinking Oikawa’s tea,” Kei tells him in lieu of good-bye, and manages to keep his voice from cracking, just barely.

  
  


☉

  
  


Kei didn’t mean to come back to Tokyo. Not quite yet, not like this, with dried blood crusted under his nails and Kuroo’s stupid bomber jacket in his hands. He would have preferred to return a glorious figure of triumph, Kuroo tied to him with a neon pink string. The string would be there to prevent Kuroo, who would be well and unhurt and alive in this dream, from running away again. It would also be there to piss him off.

 

Kei didn’t mean to come back to Tokyo, but between the high-rise waters and the strange, shrill jingling of bells in Hakoguni, he must have stopped thinking for a moment. All it really ever takes is a moment— a moment to fall in love, a moment to fall down the unkind side of a mountain, a moment to think  _ I want to go home _ even though you’ve been trying to convince yourself otherwise for so long. All it took was a stab of childlike uncertainty. Kei is still eighteen years young. He’s never seen the other side of the sun.

 

Besides, it’s not like the situation’s gotten particularly worse or better because of that split-second choice. Kuroo is still missing, and Tokyo is still standing, and Kuroo is still missing. It’s not as if Kei actually knows where he should be going.

 

Nothing’s changed. He’s still got to figure out where his heart has gone, and how to give it away. He still has to leave eventually, and he will.

 

And it’s not as if Kei actually misses Kuroo (he does), whose presence is so big it used to drape itself across the city like a canopy.

 

There are two Tokyo’s in Kei’s mind: the one without Kuroo, and the one with him. The Tokyo without Kuroo in it exists only in Kei’s memories now, nothing more than a sugar-smeared birthday card for a ten year old who knew everything about dinosaurs and nothing about making friends. The Tokyo with Kuroo in it is the one Kei has known for the other half of his life, which is the only part that really matters. The only part that’s brilliant enough to put in a museum, next to all the other Kuroo-related things that have accumulated under family restaurant tables, inside dingy toilet cubicles.

 

Kei watches the city roll out of bed through the glass walls of the elevator, resplendent in blue skies and concrete-crusted greenery, and marvels at its loneliness.

  
  


☉

  
  


Hinata tries to tell him, when he walks into The Caged Bird, that all the coffee machines in the  _ konbini _ across Tokyo are still broken, but Kei already knows this, thank you very much. He tries to elbow his way past Hinata, who is holding a beaten-up broomstick in the doorway and looking frightfully energetic at nine o’clock in the morning. It doesn’t work.

 

“What can I get you,” Hinata asks pointedly, brandishing his broomstick like he's casting a protective spell against sour-faced blond teenagers.

 

“Nothing?” Kei gives up and leans back against a wall, folding his arms. He doesn’t have any paper boxes in plastic carriers to fiddle with anymore, which is starting to become an issue. He needs something to do with his hands, with his nerves.

 

He doesn’t really have anything special to say to Hinata either, to be honest. But it feels like Kei’s been deep-sea diving for the last few days, not just between realms but between the dark, twisting alleys of the past, and now that he’s back in Tokyo, he can finally come up for air again. These are creature comforts. The departing hands of winter on his cold cheeks that had seemed so far away while he stumbled across the dry desert; the way the skyline looms above him, shrouded with cigarette smoke. Familiar sights.

 

Maybe Kei has grown to be more sentimental than his twelve year-old self had ever intended on being. The memory of his conversation with Hinata, with the lake water sadness and textbook math questions, has stayed with him, alongside everything else. He thinks about being seventeen. Walking with his eyes shut, listening with everything except his heart.

 

“You’re being strange, Tsukishima,” Hinata informs him somberly. He cocks his head to one side like a pigeon does that arbitrary pecking motion when it walks, and manages to look just as clueless. “The fact that you’re here at all is strange.”

 

Kei raises an eyebrow. “That so?”

 

“Last I remembered, you’d been gone too long and everyone was pissed as hell.”

 

_ Pissed as hell _ does not sound good, but at least it isn’t quite at a Sugawara-broke-a-pencil-while-smiling-like-an-angel level of not good. Kei has heard third person accounts of the latter. Third person accounts are the only thing he’s ever managed to get ahold of, when it comes to Sugawara’s mythical outbursts.

 

“I was looking for a missing person. Missing persons are a bit hard to find,” he articulates flatly.

 

Hinata scrunches up his face, nose wrinkling and eyebrows scrunching up with the intensity of the action.

 

“Missing who?”

 

While Hinata is never not annoying, he is also never quite as jarringly invasive in his wide-eyed innocence as Bokuto’s entire existence is. As a result, instead of being completely overwhelmed by his presence, Kei now has the time to be concerned about his actual response.

 

Kei is very concerned. A small curl of unease unfurls in his gut, settling thick and heavy like the beginnings of a cold.

 

He watches Hinata carefully. “Kuroo. Who else?”

 

The pigeon-like cluelessness hasn’t left him in the slightest. He tilts his head to the other side. “Who’s that?”

 

“Kuroo Tetsurou, the one with the  _ hair _ who resembles a cat. The coda diver.”

 

Lately, Kei has been on the receiving end of a painfully wide range of stares, of which the only condemning similarity is how all of them include  _ confusion _ somewhere in the cocktail mix of emotions. Either something’s wrong with everyone else, or something is wrong with him. Regardless, there is clearly a problem.

 

There has to be something wrong, because Hinata stands in the coffee shop, broom leaning precariously against a loosely-clenched hand, for a good minute. Just staring at Kei, or through him. Hinata, who had gone all bug-eyed at Kuroo and Bokuto’s penguin stunt all those years ago and semi-seriously asked for an autograph, stands there.

 

Then his gaze refocuses, recognition trickling back into his expression, and he jumps. The broom clatters to the ground.

 

“Oh, I know who you’re talking about!” Hinata sounds very pleased with himself. “Don’t remember him being missing though. I don’t think I’ve seen him in a few years?”

 

On the other side of the figurative universe, where everyone hasn’t forgotten about Kuroo Tetsurou’s stupid face and name and hair, Kei is very— very uneasy, the way you get when you’ve left the house and you’re positive you’ve missed out something important, but you can’t remember what it is. It’s the sort of feeling that closes in on you like a stranger’s hands around your throat, cold and clammy on your skin. You can’t breathe. You can’t breathe.

 

“Never mind that,” Kei says, changing the subject. He’s starting to realize that conversations like these will not go anywhere. These faraway stars are too distant to be called back into the night sky of the city now, hidden behind the thick film of light pollution.

 

He takes a seat in one of the high chairs, props his feet up on the ledge under the table, and settles in to watch Hinata work. He finishes his erratic sweeping job, disappears into the back of the shop for a bit, and then returns with both hands empty.

 

“Say, remember what you said to me last year?” Kei asks, when Hinata stops looking busy and starts looking excited about finding something to busy himself with again. He turns at the sound of Kei’s voice, brown eyes widening to the size of saucers.

 

“Nope! I said a lot of things. Which one?”

 

Without his realizing it, Kei has started fiddling with his hands again. He stills, tucks them back into his pockets.

 

“The thing about being in love, or whatever,” he replies, trying to keep his voice low, disinterested. This is not a conversation he has to have, he is aware, and not one that will flow easily. The distance between the stars and them is already widening, the crystalline shine of a Cheshire cat smile evaporating off of Tokyo’s unruly streets.

 

Still, still. Kei has crossed a desert on foot for a stupid  _ congratulations on your wedding  _ card. He knows a few things about people now. He knows a few things about speaking up into the intimidating glare of silence.

 

Hinata hums.  _ Sort of, sort-of-not-really. Who is Kuroo Tetsurou? I kinda know. Just kinda. _

 

“It was mean of me, to respond that way. You weren’t wrong.” Not wrong, but not right either. Not here, not yet. Kei is taking these things one step at a time, like scaling the side of a very steep mountain. He will reach the top eventually, where he will lie on his back with his bag pillowed under his head, and then reach out with one hand and touch the lowest point of the sky. Until he gets there, he will keep his eyes on the ground in front of him.

 

Hinata laughs, all bright and airy like a helium balloon inflated in the shape of a gold star. He looks eighteen, Kei thinks. He looks eighteen, all this clueless vibrant youth dripping from his morning sunshine smile like it’s never going to leave him. Hinata looks all right.

 

“You’re always mean, Tsukishima, what do you mean? But that’s fine. You know what you’re doing  _ way _ more than any of us do. I trust you.” Having remembered something which he can occupy himself with for a while, Hinata bounds back behind the counter, the broom left propped up against a round table.

 

Eighteen is a good age to be when your name is Hinata Shouyou and you want the world to cry from happiness.

 

Kei wants to cry for— well, a lot of reasons. There's the matter of the people who have somehow stuck with him long enough to know that he likes his coffee with no milk and one sugar, and there's the way all those afternoons spent flipping textbook pages in The Caged Bird are coming back to him, and there's Kuroo. Kei wants to cry for a lot of reasons. He doesn’t. Instead, he orders to go and almost smiles back at Hinata when he hands Kei his drink.

 

Instead, he keeps walking. There are places he has to be, both expected and unexpected. There are more beautiful, terrible sights to see.

  
  


☉

  
  


When Kuroo is twelve they find him trying to steal something to keep for himself, because he has and had and is nothing. Then they bring him back to Tokyo, and they put him in a room with a bed and a dresser and pillows with weird prints that Oikawa probably picked out in his sleep. They give him something. Kei gives him something.

 

Small, apple-cheeked Kei calls it a brachiosaurus, soft and pliable in his hands and painted bright turquoise. Kuroo looks at it like it’s made of stars.

 

When Kuroo is twelve, his first disappearing act comes to an end, the game of hide and seek abruptly cut short by bigger, stronger hands from an organization that is terrified and fascinated by him in equal measures. Kei finds him in the metaphorical void of outer space, and tugs him only half-reluctantly back to earth.

 

It happens again.

 

It happens again like this: when Kuroo is fifteen, he disappears. It is spring, a time of beginnings. The city stretches like a cat, revealing the underbelly that had gone into hibernation in the winter. Kuroo is starting to realize that his hands will never stop shaking and that people will never stop asking about his crooked pinky finger, so he disappears.

 

Springtime, the cherry blossoms bleeding pastel pink all over the streets. Nighttime— Kei’s parents break the front door in half coming in. They start speaking in bullet train-tongue at the same time, their words tripping over each other in their hurry to reach his ears.

 

_ Kei darling Kuroo’s missing do you have any idea where he could be we know you know him best we’re not asking for much just the slightest— _

 

Kei has, quite possibly, never known fear like this. He is thirteen this year and has some kind of weird poetry analysis for homework due tomorrow, and now Kuroo is missing, and Ms. He with her pretty floral blazers and honey-glazed smile is going to be disappointed in him.

 

He doesn’t have time to think about that. Because his parents look like they’re going to tear down the screen door in the kitchen too, he gives them the list of Kuroo’s usual haunts, as limited as can be when you’re fifteen and recklessly, heartlessly young. Then, taking advantage of a moment in which their heads are both turned, he slips out the wreckage of the front door.

 

Eight p.m. on a Tuesday night, not unpleasantly chilly yet but just on the verge of it. The city balanced on the precipice of something, a shudder of wind flipping the collar of Kei’s shirt up. He checks all the spots he told his parents about, footsteps light as a drizzle of rain, then others— unusual places, snow-soaked places, places still thawing the cold out of their concrete teeth.

 

Nothing. Tokyo is not ready to go to bed yet, but Kei feels the fatigue winding its way around his shoulders. Kei wants to go home, where there are safer things like hot milk and poetry analysis worksheets, safer people. By this he means: people who are consistent, who have not become emotional liabilities. By this he means: he has never known fear like this.

 

It is by pure coincidence that Kei stumbles onto an empty backstreet, lured in by the alienish glow of a  _ konbini. _ His feet are sore, and the hour is late, and he’s rubbing his eyes behind his glasses with his fisted hands, and—

 

Kei is the one who finishes Kuroo’s second game of hide and seek. Kei is the one who finds him. Standing in a shimmering pool of white light, face tilted towards the sky, wearing a look of longing so raw and ragged that Kei’s thirteen year old heart doesn’t quite know what to do with it. What can he do? Kei wants to take the whole Alice in Wonderland mess of Kuroo’s smile and make it better again, but he doesn’t know how to translate that feeling into something he can make real with his hands.

 

Across from him, Kuroo’s hands, Kuroo’s hands are alive, fingers fluttering like butterfly wings, one pinky trailing behind. Kuroo’s hands are doing what Kuroo himself seemingly cannot: trying to run away.

 

Kei sucks in a lungful of cool night air. He digs his shoe into the ground to make sure that it’s still there. That he’s still here.

 

“Kuroo,” he finally says. They are ten and twelve again and he is reaching out through the darkness, offering a turquoise brachiosaurus figurine. Kei is ten again, saying  _ I’m here. _

 

The boy with the melted butter eyes and the pianist’s hands pulls his gaze away from the stars. Looks towards Kei. Blinks once, twice.

 

Then, like turning the lights on in a pitch-black room, the warmth floods back in. Kuroo turns to face Kei properly, the same old smile blinking across his face.

 

“Congratulations, Tsukki. You found me.”

  
  


☉

  
  


Kei didn’t mean to come back to Tokyo quite yet, and he certainly doesn’t mean to go to a supermarket. One way or another, he ends up in a  _ Tokyu _ supermarket (not the one Kuroo broke into, not that it matters), standing in the fresh produce section as store employees wax lyrical in loudspeaker voices about their grapes and tomatoes and then the slightly smaller tomatoes, which are supposedly better for his health and karma because they are redder, or yellower, or something.

 

The fact that Oikawa Tooru happens to be at the same  _ Tokyu _ at this peculiar late-afternoon hour of the day is almost funny. Kei  _ almost  _ lets out a laugh when he runs into him, brown hair askew in a way that genuinely suggests it was not styled at all, pencil-lead eyebags smeared across his face. The keyword is almost; Kei manages to catch himself before he accidentally summons the wrath of the gods.

 

“Tsukishima, my boy.”

 

As a testament to his power, Oikawa succeeds in sounding both utterly lifeless and delighted. He is leaning against his shopping cart, which contains necessities like eggs and broccoli and six two-liter bottles of Pocari Sweat, face held against the light at an angle that conceals the worst of his dark eye circles.

 

“Good afternoon, Oikawa. You look like you had a good night’s rest.”

 

Oikawa’s smile grows abysmally brighter. “I see your extended trip did nothing to deplete your endless reserves of sarcasm.”

 

Kei can’t help the smug grin that sneaks out. “I’m honored to hear that.”

 

“So,” Oikawa says, bending down to regale the chocolate selection with his angelic presence. “What prompted the early return?”

 

Kei shrugs, though he knows the other won’t see it. Actually, maybe he will. Kei wouldn’t be surprised if Oikawa secretly has three-hundred-and-sixty degree vision and has simply been keeping the ability hidden from all of them so he can use it to expose the worst of their criminally deplorable practices one day. Oikawa would do that.

 

“An accident,” Kei answers plainly. Oikawa clicks his tongue in response, one hand hovering distractedly over a bar of orange-flavored chocolate. “Do you know a man called Ushijima?”

 

At this, the orange chocolate bar  _ dies.  _ Oikawa swipes at it, probably without meaning to, and it goes careening across the floor, hitting the metal railing of the opposite aisle with a weak thud. After staring silently at its carcass for a second, Oikawa turns back around.

 

“Nope!” He answers, very cheerful, very false. It’s a hundred percent bullshit, and both of them know it.

 

Kei sighs. “That’s a pity. He spoke quite fondly of you.”

 

Oikawa does something with his teeth which probably just involves grinding them together with a lot of feeling, but ends up sounding like he wants to eat the sun. Or Ushijima. Whichever is closer, whichever is more annoying.

 

Clearly, it’s a sore spot for him. Kei isn’t  _ not _ amused, but above that, he is concerned with the inner workings of the universe. Ushijima is no longer here to untangle the mess of it with his strong eyebrows and gravelly voice, so Kei has to do something about it himself. It’s funny, having responsibilities for once. Is this what adulthood will feel like? Is this what Kuroo and Oikawa’s lot has to deal with every day, choosing between staying silent and speaking up, regular tomatoes and expensive as hell tomatoes, making grocery trips on Sundays when all the teenagers get to lie in and contemplate their feelings of betrayal towards the impending school week? No wonder they all drink that much. It’s terrible.

 

Oikawa saves him from having to breach the subject, which is slowly turning into more of a daydream and less of something he can actually realistically bring up. Still looking like he swallowed a whole onion raw, he returns the chocolate bar to its rightful resting place and then straightens up, planting his hands on his hips.

 

“That jacket looks familiar.” Oikawa nods at the red bomber.

 

Kei jumps at his words, as enthusiastically as Kei will ever jump at anything. “It belongs to a close friend.”

 

“Of who? You?”

 

“You, actually.”

 

Oikawa narrows his eyes theatrically. “What is this, an alien conspiracy?”

 

This, along with a dozen other lines suggesting extraterrestrial interference, is familiar. Oikawa is always accusing people and inanimate objects of being aliens. Kei secretly thinks it is because he himself might actually be one, but that’s a story for another day.

 

Today’s story goes like this: Oikawa asks if this is an alien conspiracy, and Kei says  _ yes. _

 

“It might be,” Kei says slowly, so the words have time to sink in. They sink in very well. So well, in fact, that they join the pencil-lead eyebags in making Oikawa look a lot less like a supermodel. On any other day, Kei would have marveled at the difference it can make. Today, he passes up the opportunity. The gods can have their peace for a while more.

 

Oikawa finally stops pretending he gives a shit about what kind of chocolate he’s bringing back for a disgruntled, hungover Iwaizumi, and gives his full attention to Kei.

 

“What the  _ fuck _ is up on this fine Sunday, my dear Tsukishima.”

 

Kei can’t help it. He has to smile. Call it a coping method for bizarre surreal situations like this, where his best friend of eight years has apparently been erased from everyone’s memories. Call it strength. He has to smile.

 

“It’s exactly what you think it is.”

  
  


☉

  
  


It isn’t what Oikawa thinks it is. Kei blames his overactive, constantly-high-on-gummy-frogs imagination; Oikawa blames him.

 

It isn’t what Oikawa thinks it is, because he has this whole convoluted theory prepared which he probably ripped off of Reddit, about time travel and parallel worlds and a thrilling romance that spans like three and a half centuries and includes more than one dead suitor. Kei’s story may be a bit of a joke, but it isn’t that much of a train wreck yet. The keyword here is  _ yet. _

 

Nevertheless, it’s a start. Kei stands in the candy aisle of a Tokyu supermarket and gives Oikawa the short version of Kuroo’s disappearing act. Naturally, this includes the part where they’ve all known the guy for at least half a decade but now no one has any idea what Kei’s talking about when he mentions  _ the hair. _ Kuroo has very distinct hair. No one has ever not understood when Kei mentioned  _ the hair. _

 

Being eighteen and kind of young and kind-of-a-lot-of-other things, Kei is approximately forty shades of  _ ready to throw myself out of the earth’s atmosphere.  _ But Oikawa does not join him in his building crescendo of panic. Beneath all his bullshit, Oikawa has always been brave and brilliant and bold, sort of like a knight in shining armor, even if no one ever tells him that for fear of inflating his ego so much it vanishes into the clouds. He holds up a well-manicured hand, crescent moon nails flashing.

 

“First of all, calm down. Secondly,  _ calm down. _ We can fix this. You met Ushiwaka-chan, right? Like it or not, there’s a ninety-nine percent chance he’s right.

 

The Flow’s a finicky thing. It either likes you or doesn’t, but that designation can change. Think about it, Tsukishima— you said your guy doesn’t have the first ten years of his life in memories— that’s as good a reason as any for the Flow to wanna purge him from its belly. So if you wanna save him, you’ll have to start by getting to him.”

 

Oikawa’s lips curl distastefully around the nickname he refers to Ushijima by, but above all the sound of his voice is reassuring, familiar like neighborhood playgrounds and sand boxes full of miniature cities. Kei feels the glow of the supermarket around him more acutely than he did before. Kei feels real, which is a lot more than he can say about anything else now.

 

“But why haven’t  _ I _ forgotten about him,” he says in the end, trying not to let his frustration show and failing horribly at it.

 

“Aliens,” Oikawa responds soberly, and then when the thin mask of distaste slips off Kei’s face and the panic resurfaces again he adds, “Really though, I have no idea.” He grabs a not-orange chocolate bar, chucks it into the shopping cart.

 

“I don't know where he is.”

 

“You've got that tacky jacket, haven't you? I'm sure it'll be of some help, if it really means that much to him. Like magnets and gravitational pulls and all that shit.”

 

One of these days Kei is going to have to sit Iwaizumi down and tell him about how incredible his not-lover is. The racks of colorful candy regard him cheerfully, artificially bright.

 

“I hope you find your guy, young lovesick Tsukishima. I really do.” Oikawa may not have the slightest inkling who Kei is even talking about at this point, but it turns out some things don’t go away even in the face of reality-distorting phenomena. Things like red-light-green-light conversations. Things like  _ you’re in love with him.  _ Things like the invisible-ink thumbprints that people leave behind in your mind even when they’re gone, warning signs left in all the places where you might one day rediscover the sound of their laugh.

 

Oikawa knows his shit far too well. It should be illegal, or else one day he is going to reveal the worst of everyone’s criminally deplorable practices and they will all die, and then Oikawa will stand there and laugh all delicate and bell-like at their corpses.

 

“Thank you,” Kei says.

 

Maybe Oikawa’s hair had been styled up that morning after all. It doesn’t look  _ that _ bad.

 

Kei buys him a can of Arizona green tea.

  
  


☉

  
  


All the coffee machines in Tokyo are still broken, a fact which Kei is beginning to associate with Kuroo, just because he can. It is of no importance to him whether or not it’s true; he doesn’t give a shit about correlation-causation fallacies right now. He only wants two things: hot coffee, and maybe Kuroo.

 

Just maybe, maybe, Kuroo.

 

Kei focuses, for the time being, on  _ locating _ him. This is much harder than it was when Kei was thirteen and only had to worry about the implications of leaving his poetry assignment undone.

 

Kuroo loves games, and hide and seek is no exception, but in this one there are only two players left alive, running frantically all over the map while their strength steadily depletes and all the buried treasure gets tired of waiting to be found and exits the stage. Kei is standing on the edge of a very tall, very steep precipice, peering down over the edge. Kei is— Kei is trying.

 

The sky morphs from red, to violet, to a deep Persian blue offset only by the kaleidoscopic colors of the city. Kei didn’t mean to come back to Tokyo just yet, but he’s here, and he’s had a day to drink in the smog and smoke that lines these world-weary streets. He didn’t really ask for it, but the insufferable individuals around him have built the ground back up beneath his feet, so he thinks he can keep walking. So he thinks he’s almost ready to go now.

 

Tokyo is not quite Tokyo without Kuroo in it. Which is funny, because the city’s been here all of Kei’s life and even before that, rising and falling like a heart-whole chest with the centuries, decades, years. It is a realization that has finally dawned on Kei, the way large hammer-shaped projectiles sometimes come flying at you out of the blue.

 

The world is not quite itself without Kuroo in it. When the news had arrived on Kei’s doorstep, wrapped in the shiver of Yamaguchi’s voice over the phone, nothing had stopped. There are bigger accidents to worry about than beautiful boys with bad hair and apocalyptic smiles. Accidents charged with less emotion and more conviction. Accidents that are high-stakes, groundbreaking tragedies, that you could write a whole movie about.

 

But maybe, just maybe, Kei’s world is smaller than that. Maybe Kei is more selfish than that.

 

Maybe Kei is more honest than all this, than the glittering glass of skyscrapers and the whir of coffee machines and the strange little dances people do around each other to get anywhere in this city.

 

Maybe Kei’s finally ready to answer that last question.

  
  


☉

  
  


“You look like you’re in love,” is the first thing Yamaguchi says to him when he arrives.

 

They are on the platform of a train station. At the intersection between strangers and lovers, between night and day, between home and some place beyond the splintered sea of stars. All the commuters are walking with their shirt collars turned up against the nighttime chill, making red-light-green-light eyes at each other across the jagged platform gaps.

 

They are on the platform of a train station. They are here.

 

By now, Kei suspects he is the only one left who recalls a single thing about Kuroo Tetsurou, who could actually be arguably said to hail from the stars by now. The fact that Yamaguchi doesn’t comment on his jacket, absence, or lies tells him as much. Kei has no idea how the mottled fabric of human memory reshapes itself around these distortions. He doesn’t really want to know.

 

Yamaguchi looks well, like he's been waking up on the right side of bed every morning or has managed to snag the last bagel sandwich at the bakery across the street for three days in a row. His eyes are bright, freckled cheeks pink and half-hidden by his burgundy scarf. At least one of them has had a decent weekend, and Kei’s glad it’s him.

 

So anyway, Yamaguchi says  _ you look like you’re in love  _ and Kei doesn’t— Kei doesn’t walk away. This is new. The shrug he offers in return is new. They are treading the same gummed up streets in different ways now, learning to avoid the potholes and pitfalls and slippery-sticky patches of juice and beer.

 

Kei sounds his question out into the sequined swath of night. “Who told you that?”

 

Yamaguchi studies him carefully. “You. Your eyes? You look different.”

 

“I have not been replaced by an alien that happens to look exactly like Tsukishima Kei, if that's what you're wondering.”

 

“I’m not talking about that!” He laughs, eighteen and alive and buzzed on the golden nectar of youth, and destiny, and all the other things they tell you about in stories. “You know what I mean.”

 

“I don't.  _ You _ don't even know who you're talking about.”

 

Yamaguchi’s brow crinkles faintly. “You're right, I don’t.” He bites his lip.

 

The universe seems to have it out for Kei and his white headphones and his stubborn, stubborn mind. Yet somehow, Yamaguchi always finds his way around the barriers he puts up, both conscious and unconscious. It’s one of his many talents, which include being annoying in every other situation, and laughing in a way that makes everyone in his vicinity trip over their shoelaces out of surprise.

 

“But I know you.”

 

The train rushes in, bringing with it all the dust-and-dream riddled commuters that have ventured out on this cold Sunday night, bringing in a gust of billowing wind. Yamaguchi hunches his shoulders against the onslaught, drops his gaze for a second.

 

Kei opens his mouth.

 

“I think I'm in love with him.”

 

At this, Yamaguchi looks up again, something like awe in his face. Around them, everyone falling out of the plastic straw-tubes of their predestined fates, falling in love. The city waxing and waning in heartbeats.

 

Kei’s heart has always been a fragile, fleeting thing. He's always resented himself for it, quietly hated the way it never listened, the way it never stopped trying to shatter itself whenever people were anything but unkind to him, whenever Kuroo was around.

 

But Yamaguchi smiles at him now, slow and soft and spreading from one side of his face to the other, and the train is leaving but neither of them makes a move, the automated doors sliding shut, the love stories they'll never know speeding away from them. Speeding towards the endings they will all carve out of newspaper headlines for themselves.

 

“I know,” he says.  _ Thank you for telling me. _

 

Kei has always been grateful, beneath all the things he cannot quite say and all the things he has now said, for the people around him. For Yamaguchi, Oikawa, Hinata, Bokuto. Yachi, Sawamura, Kageyama, Kenma. Akiteru the traitor and his dreams that grew too big for college to keep safe in its blown-up lecture theaters. His parents.

 

All of them like lighthouses perched at the long end of an island, guiding him through the dark.

 

“I’m in love with him,” Kei says again— because he can, because he hasn't been able to for the last eight years, the words forever caught up in his throat the way sunlight gets trapped at the bottom of the swimming pool. The way you can't see where you're going sometimes because you're too afraid to open your eyes. The realization doesn't hit him like a brick to the face, like a dramatic scene in a thriller movie, like the plot twist near the end of the story. It’s nothing more than an opening up of the heart, an admission to the self. A giving in.

 

Yamaguchi nudges him with his shoulder. “Yes you are, my tallest and wisest friend. Now go. You've got somewhere to be, haven't you?”

 

Kei nods, pushing down the ache in his chest. Leaving is never pleasant. He has no idea how Kuroo has managed to do it so many times, hide and seek and tightrope acts be damned.

 

Yamaguchi’s voice threads its way through the shifting sand dune crowds as Kei turns and hurries down the flight of steps leading to the station gantry, following after him like a good luck charm.

 

“Come back safe, Tsukki. Come back safe.”

 

Leaving is never pleasant. So he will have to offset it with something else, which is the magic trick that happens after the disappearing act, which is the part where he returns, triumphant, a trail of light blazing behind him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> HI GUYS I'M BACK FROM THE CLUTCHES OF HELL today i studied by which i almost died. i also took a nap until 10:30 at night before settling down to check through this chapter so that's fantastic. nonetheless, i present to you all chapter 7. it's called the obligatory filler beach episode in my planning document bc that's what it feels like to me- like a breather i guess? a big ass breather by the way, because shit's gonna hit the fan really soon. shit i've been, like, making plans to throw at said fan since the start of august. SO YEAH. i'm like this (this) close to finishing up my draft of the final chapter so i'm going to be done with kei's personal suffering soon, at which point i will hopefully go back to dying over finals  
> thank you for reading, as always. this is getting so fucking long that i'm amazed i still give a shit about it. therefore i am 300 times as amazed that all of you are still here!! it means the world to me. really. every kudo, comment, and bookmark makes me smile like a dumbass in public and then get shamed by my 3.5 friends. truly. see you guys on sunday
> 
> have a good one


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “That's bullshit,” Kei says calmly.
> 
> He could trace the rise and fall of a hundred nations with his hands in the time it takes for Kuroo to say something, but shakily, finally, he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [today's recommended listening](https://open.spotify.com/track/5c79B1Qvf1DA2wmkrW4WEo?si=cT8O1rCXR3azDG0T_e1EoA), also the old sad song on the piano

“Why are you so scared of swimming pools?”

 

Kuroo finally asks him this one day, papery orange leaves eddying around his bird’s nest hair as he runs a hand through it absently.

 

Because it is the beginning of fall, his usual array of tank tops and shorts has been swapped out in favor of apparel like sweatshirts and hoodies. Because it is the beginning of fall, and fall is Kei’s favorite time of the year, he is happy. He still isn't sure of how to show it, but finds himself very much in the middle of the feeling nevertheless. He is still standing on the rooftop of his middle school with Kuroo five feet away. Just five feet away.

 

Kuroo is sixteen now, poised delicately at the juncture between being clueless about everything and being angry. He is still lithe and catlike, full of all those things that make youth look like a Polaroid photograph, but already his shadow is filling out; growing stronger, growing taller. Of course, Kei still has a few centimeters on him, even then, but still. Still.

 

Kuroo is sixteen now, so they're not in the same school anymore. He is back today as a visiting alumnus, dressed nicely the way middle schoolers aren't allowed to be, and now he is here with Kei, who is in his tastelessly dull uniform, looking like he swallowed a whole lemon and a half. Now he is wearing that half-lidded smile that makes Kei’s chest feel like it's getting attacked with a vacuum cleaner, and he is asking a question that sounds like it's been stuck in his head for a long time, and Kei—

 

“Who said I’m scared of swimming pools?”

 

Kei’s voice turns steely. He doesn’t know how else to respond.

 

Kuroo meets his gaze with a cloudy, indecipherable look in his eyes. “Me.”

 

“Well. I’m not.” Backed suddenly into a corner which he has never had to stand in before, he finds it easy to say everything but the truth. Kei feels the distance between them overflow. There are oceans bursting out of the cracked concrete.

 

“That so?”

 

“Yes. I’m not scared of anything.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Kuroo changes topics with much more ease than Kei had expected him to, but then and again, Kuroo is sixteen now. Sixteen is still a bit of a pipe dream to Kei, who has a curfew of seven p.m. and still gets to pick what's for dinner when his parents are home early enough to cook it. He lets the matter drop. Kuroo doesn't try to pick it up with his absent, fidgety hands, and they go back to talking about the weather. About fall, the vivid colors of the city landscape, how everything dies and is reborn again afterwards. About how much Kei cares for it, which is not at all, he says. Not at all.

 

And it’s all right if Kei’s uneasy, because Kuroo glosses over it the way he always does, the smooth motorcycle engine purr of his voice alarmingly pleasing to Kei’s ears. He’s a high schooler now. High schoolers are big, and tall, and closer to the ceiling of the sky than they are to their middle school counterparts. High schoolers know when to stop asking questions. High schoolers smell like hair gel and sweet Osmanthus and winter, or maybe that's just Kuroo. Either way, Kei can't get any of it out of his head. Kuroo is dressed very nicely today. Kei can't get any of it out of his head.

  
  


☉

  
  


Oikawa said  _ go get him,  _ so Kei’s thought process, when he finally dives away from Tokyo, goes like this:

 

He pictures Kuroo across the annals of time, a million different boys wearing a million different colored sneakers, all with the same eyes. He pictures the bomber jacket he is wearing, the riot red bleeding right out of the silk spun fabric, a smear of color flowing from a river back towards the open sea.

 

He doesn’t try to picture where Kuroo came from (he must have come from somewhere, somehow), because he has no idea how to even begin constructing a home from scratch. There are rules to diving. According to those rules, you have to know the name and shape of a realm before you can get there; the sight and sound of it.

 

He can’t picture where Kuroo came from, so he shouldn’t be able to go anywhere. But then and again, Kuroo has never been one for rules. He has broken them again and again and again, by hurtling through traffic, by prying the hinges off of supermarket doors, by existing. Then and again, the laws of the universe have always found a way to swerve around Kuroo, as if he were one of those reckless, heartbroken drivers on the highway that no one wants to get near. Kei holds his reservations at bay.

 

Tightening his grip around his jacket, he jumps.

  
  


☉

  
  


There is something poignant about the last piece of candy in a bag of pick ‘n mix.

 

Actually, scratch that. If you had asked Kei when he was seven and just beginning to discover the magical properties of sugar, he would have declared the entire bag sacred. All of it: the blue dolphins, the apple rings, the sugar-coated strawberry drops that melt like cotton candy clouds in your mouth. Sugar is something to be celebrated.

 

So if a bag of pick ‘n mix is a celebration, then whittling it all the way down to the final piece, the proverbial last man standing, effectively marks the end of that celebration. This is the dying hour of the festival, all the kids passing through the night on their way home to brightly-lit bedrooms, all the adults tearing down the colored tarps from their carnival stalls. This is the end of a journey, of the life-changing sort.

 

It’s poignant. Kei can’t quite explain it, the way he couldn’t explain to Yamaguchi and Sawamura and the whole wide-eyed lot of them how he knew Kuroo wasn’t dead before he took off after the living specter of him. He can’t quite explain it, but he knows it anyway.

 

This is it. The end of the bullet train ride, the serrated-knife story, whatever the two of them have been keeping holed up in the yawning chasm of space between them for all these years.

 

This is it. Kei opens his eyes—

 

And finds himself floating on his back in the middle of an ocean, clear turquoise like the stained-glass windows of a chapel. He scrambles forward, with nothing save for the jacket around his shoulders. The water barely reaches his waist. He wades through it until he reaches some sort of dry land.

 

Apart from Kuroo’s red jacket, he has nothing. He doesn’t know where the metal whistle, which is his only ticket home, went, but it’s not anywhere near him anymore. Once, a riff diver had gotten himself stuck in another realm, and he wasn't okay for a long, long time after that. Given all the things he knows, Kei figures he should probably be worried, and yet isn't.

 

He looks up. Above him is a cloudless, perfectly white sky. It’s so bright it almost seems to be glowing, casting the world below in an ethereal glow.

 

But that’s not all. Kei tilts his head back down. Rising out of the fruit punch waters are diamond-cut castles, turrets, and towers that look like they’ve burst right out of the pages of a storybook. Rising out of the turquoise of the sea is an entire kingdom.

 

Most of all, it is crumbling.

 

Because wherever the hell Kei has landed, it looks like a half-eaten carcass given over to the whims of the elements, falling apart with the visible effort of trying to keep itself afloat. The turrets and towers and suspended bridges that lead from one full stop to another are collapsing in real-time, losing bits and pieces of themselves with every passing second. None of them more than half here, like apparitions in the hazy morning light. None of them more real than daydreams and all those other fanciful things you see in stories.

 

It’s a lot of destruction. It’s a lot of history. There’s a lot going missing here, least of all Kuroo, who Kei hopes with all his tired might is somewhere in this wreckage. Least of all Kuroo, whose tacky red bomber has led Kei here.

 

So everything screams on around him, the foundations of an ancient, medieval memory sinking into the too-clear water. Kei pushes forward against the tides of time, biting back the discomfort and fear sitting low in the rib cage of his heart. The sky stays painfully white and glassy-eyed.

 

And, above it all, trembling, a song.

 

Above it all, a song.

  
  


☉

  
  


When Kei is eight, he almost drowns. When Kei is eight, he learns about other worlds. When Kei is born, Tokyo takes him into its broken glass arms and then holds him here. It holds him.

 

When Kei is eight, he almost drowns. When Kei is ten, he learns about other boys, and all the strange, groundbreaking feelings that come with them. When Kei is five. When Kei is thirteen.

 

Somewhere along the way, Kei falls in love. But when?

 

Somewhere along the way, Kuroo falls out of the sky.

 

But how? How?  _ How? _

 

When Kei is eighteen, Kuroo goes missing, and the world doesn’t come to a standstill. There is nothing monumental about the new name on the missing persons board in the lobby, about the way the tail-end of winter curls around the vacancy in the train carriage of the city. There is nothing monumental about Kei, who is still living inside his head, who is still wondering where the universe came from.

 

When Kei is one, two, three, four; eight, eight, eight. When Kei is eight— When Kei is eight—

 

But that’s not the point. The point is, when will Kei move forward out of this mess, when will Kei start living in the present again? He has been in love for a long, long time. Kuroo has been smiling like a switchblade for even longer than that.

 

And here is the answer: Kei will go home when they figure out what happened when Kei was eight. Because it’s important, because Kei wasn’t the only one that almost drowned that day. Because it’s here. The present. It’s here.

  
  


☉

  
  


Kei’s middle school had a grand piano.

 

This fact comes back to him in bits and pieces as he heads towards the source of the music, climbing on and over jagged bits of land. The ocean is everywhere, and therefore nowhere. Kei has forgotten what it feels like to be dry.

 

He heads towards the sound of the music because he is compelled to, but as he gets closer to its source it starts to grow on him the way morning glory twines itself around the window sills of palm-sized balconies. It starts to sound like the second music room in his middle school— billowing curtains, chorus-echoes, the ghost of a grand piano.

 

And Kei remembers: the orange of the evening as it crept in through the windows, the way Kuroo looked like a Renaissance painting limned in gold, his awkward hunch as he stood bent over the keys, head tilted to one side, eyes half-closed.

 

_ “That song— what’s it called?” _

 

_ “I dunno.” _

 

It’s strange, how familiar it still is. It’s strange. But then Kei has to stop thinking about that, because he nudges something with his shoe and it makes a sound like bells jingling. He goes sputtering right out of the water.

 

Situating himself safely on the third step of a half-decimated staircase, Kei peers down.

 

The culprit is both exactly what he had expected it to be, and not. Kei has heard these bells before in another realm— in a maze of boxes filled with origami-plastered walls and ceiling murals of tigers real enough to draw blood with their turpentine teeth. Kei has heard these bells before, only that was in another realm. Another pocket of time.

 

But this is different, and immediate, and this is  _ here.  _ The second music room with the unlatched door goes away and in its wake are all these things from further-off places; a string of silver bells from a monster’s hand, a strip of monochrome canopy-cloth, pieces of hot desert littered everywhere.

 

Then there are shiny black traffic lights, too, embedded in the soft sand at the bottom of the ocean. They look like they might blink to life at any moment, like they might launch straight into that familiar red-yellow-green dance with the black velvet shoes. Here is Tokyo as well, among everything else, mixed-up-scratched-up road signs pointing in all the wrong directions.

 

This part of it, too, is crumbling.

 

Reaching out with skinless, boneless fingers even as its whole wrist falls away, the song without a name keeps playing. Kei walks when he can, wades through the currents when he can't. He His hands are numb. He's soaked past the fabric of his clothes to his skin, and his veins beneath that, all of him turning turquoise like an alien from one of Oikawa’s conspiracy theories.

 

And finally, finally, after years of walking through unimpressionable emptiness, he sees it. A single tower, cleaving the paper white sky in half. A lighthouse in the dark. A beacon.

 

The thing is, everything here looks like a construction site building itself up in reverse, which is to say that nothing is actually standing. Nothing is taller than a stuttered gasp of breath, all of them too busy trying to kiss the startled seabed to bother looking up.

 

The thing is, this place is a shattered construction site, so the tower looks terribly out of place. It’s not falling, or sinking, or trying to bleed itself dry. In spite of the debris haloing it, it is completely intact, the circlet of ridges on top and small, rectangular windows lining the sides solid and untouched.

 

Kei stumbles forward into a clumsy, careless run, not stopping until he’s reached the base of the tower; he sprints up the twisting stone staircase inside, ignoring the burn in his legs and the fire in his lungs. Kei stumbles again, and catches himself, and emerges at the top. He makes it there. To the gray-stoned room; polished floor beneath him, nothing but open sky above.

 

Once, Kei had walked in on Kuroo playing the piano in the second music room of their middle school. They are eons away from there, now. When Kei returned to those narrow hallways a few years later, he found the old piano had been replaced with a newer one— electronic, fueled by lightning strikes, fueled by spite.

 

This is, by no means, that same room. But there is one part of the photograph that Kei recognizes, one part of the past which has crawled out of the dirt. His lungs deflate like puncture wounds.

 

At the center of the room, sitting on a too-small bench beside a piano, is Kuroo.

  
  


☉

  
  


The next time Kuroo asks him about the swimming pool they are older. They are older every time something happens— this is how the world compensates for sadness. This is how the world lets them heal.

 

It’s a bit like how open wounds turn into cicatrices so you can get over the events associated with them, if you will, although Kei likes to think that he doesn’t actually  _ have _ anything to get over. Of course, he is wrong. All of them stumble sometimes, from delicate, unbreakable Sugawara to Hinata, who thinks the whole world is an amusement park. All of them have bruised their knees before.

 

It is a few years later anyway, when Kuroo collapses onto the sofa in his one-room apartment in Meguro, and looks at Kei, eyes sleepy-sharp.

 

“You never told me,” he says, conversationally, “Why you’re scared of swimming pools.”

 

It’s been a long day. Kei is fifteen and high school has brought, along with all the brouhaha, a bunch of other annoyances, like homework, and dumbasses like Kageyama, and homework. Kuroo is seventeen, and no longer confined to the spare room at home base. He has his own apartment now.

 

Meguro is a nice place to be after a long day, in which Kuroo dragged him halfway across Tokyo to a newly-opened cat cafe in God knows where, and then prayed so hard for clear skies that the world decided to take a shit on them and drenched them with rain on the way back. It hadn’t been unpleasant— Kei is willing to admit this much now. But there was something desperate about the way Kuroo had walked, blinking madly under the afternoon sun as if he wanted to launch himself right into it. Something unbalanced about him, like a seesaw that can’t decide which way it wants to fall. Like he wanted to fall.

 

Kuroo drums his fingers against the arm of his sofa with even more urgency than usual and asks about swimming pools, and Kei, well, Kei’s tired. Mainly confused, but tired, too. His head’s filled with cotton candy and tiny mice plushies that squeak when you squeeze them. He says the first thing that comes to his mind.

 

“Because of you.”

 

Kei  _ really  _ isn’t thinking anymore; his response makes no sense at all, even to himself. No wonder Kuroo sits up properly for once, his whole hot air balloon being dragged down to earth by Kei’s words.

 

To his credit, Kei doesn’t flinch where he’s standing by the doorway. He knows he’s just given Kuroo the moral equivalent of bullshit for a reply, but there  _ was _ something in it— a pinch of salt, a pinch of truth.

 

“I never took you for a poet,” Kuroo finally replies, pleasant, prodding. He relaxes again, sinks into the mismatched cushions on the sofa.

 

Kei shrugs. Doesn’t go to sit beside him, because he can’t do that anymore. Checks his watch. They’re older each time something happens, and each time something happens something changes. Kei doesn’t know where the two of them are anymore. He’s starting to lose track of Kuroo again amidst the stars, his trajectory going all haywire and skittering off the beaten path, like his smile.

 

Kei shrugs, and then goes to get his bag.

  
  


☉

  
  


Picture this: Kei, on the top step of the old stone staircase, blond hair windswept and disheveled, chest heaving. Soaked all the way to the waistband of his pants. Glasses slip-sliding off the bridge of his nose.

 

Picture this: the bleached sky, the ash-gray tower. The light spilling in like a tidal wave, making everything look a little less real, a little less forgiving.

 

Picture this: Kuroo. A piano. A bench.

 

Kei is familiar with the logic here. Because there’s a cushioned bench, there has to be a piano. Because there is a piano, there is Kuroo, shrouded in the sounds of the second music room.

 

And because there is Kuroo, there is Kei. So here is Kei, at the top of the staircase, at the top of the world. Here is Kei.

 

Kuroo stopped playing the moment Kei came into sight, but only now does he take his fingers off the keys. The action is stilted, jagged with restraint, and Kei notes the still-healing scars on his palms, the knuckles of his fingers. The bandages he had wrapped with too much care are long gone.

 

In Kei’s head, it's only been a handful of days since the night of their encounter in the Upside Down, but how long has it been for Kuroo? Time passes differently sometimes, Ushijima had said, and the fact is slowly beginning to sink in. It doesn't make it any easier for him to accept. Their meeting then still feels unreal, the too-bright bedroom and Kuroo’s disjointed silence blurring together like wet paint in the rain. Kuroo still feels unreal.

 

He’s got to do something, or the silence will go on forever. Right now, they are two figures frozen on a movie set. Kei has to hit play. He says:

 

“Found you.”

 

Kuroo shifts on the seat until he's facing Kei. Very quickly, too quickly, a smile cracks open on his face. It's the Cheshire Cat smile, the one that means one-line texts after midnight from nowhere and cryptic replies. The one Kei hates looking at, and sees too much of anyway.

 

“It looks like you have,” Kuroo responds, but his voice is strained. His smile wavers. It never does that. Kuroo’s smile is as solid as his handsomely broad shoulders. Kuroo is built like a heartbreaker.

 

That's not fair; it feels like Kei’s heart is breaking all over again with the knowledge of it. It's hard to put the feeling into words, but— Kei feels like he's dealing with a stray cat that's been backed into a corner. Fierce, feral, blood still oozing from a cut on its front paw. This is the Kuroo they brought back to POOLS all those years ago, who couldn't hold a conversation without biting off someone’s ear, who didn't know how to play with dinosaur figurines like all the other kids. The one with the permanent shadows under his eyes. The one who saw ghosts.

 

Kei takes one step onto the landing, not breaking eye contact. “I’ve heard that song before.” He jerks his head towards the piano.

 

“It was pretty popular a few years back,” Kuroo answers, and Kei knows he's lying, and  _ he _ knows Kei knows he’s lying, so what are they doing, what is this shitty excuse for a conversation? They should know better than to try and spin each other around in circles on the sequined dance floor after all these years. They should know better.

 

But they don't. In spite of all the burning cities they've put between them, in spite of every swimming pool and every flickering streetlight, they are still only eighteen, only twenty. Too young to comprehend the immensity of staying true to a promise, too young to speak so freely.

 

Tact. Tsukishima Kei still doesn't, and probably never will, possess any tact, and he doesn't care. He has crossed too many precariously put together wood-and-rope bridges to let this moment pass him by. All of this began with the smallest hope, lifted on the wings of speculation, and in spite of everything, he is still clinging to it, the way the Tokyo morning clung to him, heavy with homesickness. In spite of everything, he still wants to believe.

 

Tact. Tsukishima Kei has no tact whatsoever, because if he did then he wouldn't have set off on this journey to begin with. He would have waited for a reply that would never come, while his heart grew old and withered with disuse in a quiet one-room apartment off the main road. He would have stayed in the city. Instead, he held his breath and jumped.

 

Fine. If Kuroo is going to play Cheshire Cat, then he will be Alice with her shiny black shoes and toppling teacup daydreams. He will get them both out of here.

 

“That's bullshit,” Kei says calmly. Kuroo doesn't respond, so he keeps staring at him. He keeps his expression even.

 

Kuroo has always reflected images of himself off the loudness and exclamations of others, letting their frustration fill up the room like a fish tank, so he’d never have to worry about how much of him was there, too. Kuroo is made out of rebounds. It is what makes him sharp, sometimes, hard to define in a word or a sentence or a story. It is what makes him terrible. Kei will not let him be terrible.

 

“That's bullshit,” he repeats, and they both know he's not talking about the song anymore.

 

Kei could trace the rise and fall of a hundred nations with his hands in the time it takes for Kuroo to say something, but shakily, finally, he does. He tilts his chin up, face to the sky.

 

“This place feels familiar.” The words are light, nonchalant, but they sting, paper cuts seething through the air.

 

Outside the window, a glittering glass skyscraper sinks into the water. The sound of it is swallowed up by all the other things dying around it in a callous cacophony of discord. If Kei tries hard enough, he thinks he can make out the sound of horses whinnying, the metallic clang of blades.  _ Once upon a time, there were two boys. Then something happened. Then something happened.  _ Kuroo sits, perfectly still, gaze averted; for the first time, he steps into the fray.

 

“When I was ten,” he says, because it is always about the when and the what with Kuroo and Kei, the way narratives lodge themselves in the secret gardens of history and only remember to bloom after centuries have passed. “I almost drowned.

 

That’s the first thing I really remember, if you don’t count my name. That’s the first thing that happened to me. I almost drowned, but I didn’t, and when I opened my eyes next I was in a huge room with no windows or anything, and there was this guy with really intense eyebrows staring back at me. He told me a little about this whole diving thing, since I looked lost as all hell, so that I at least knew where I was going. But I had to leave him, too. I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I’d been before I fell out of the water, so I had to leave.

 

It sucked, going from realm to realm, seeing all those awful things, never getting to  _ stop, _ and eventually it got to the point where I gave up and started lying about it all because it was easier that way. I hid my past and name and everything else, and people stopped getting on my case so much. But I still hated it. Those two years, I hated every moment of them.”

 

The apocalypse goes on, gently indifferent to all the heartache unfurling in its midst. Reluctantly, Kuroo drags his gaze back to Kei. He holds out his left hand, slip-scarred palm turned outwards, pinky finger bent.

 

“I wanted to pretend it didn’t happen, but since we’re at the end of the line anyway,” he laughs mirthlessly. “You always wanted to know, right?

 

Long story short, we were in the ocean that smells like lavender, and our boat capsized— I was just a little too close to the outboard motor. The skin healed, eventually. Nothing else did.”

 

His words are heavy; the room shrinks around them. Kei wants to say something, anything, but he can’t, his throat is all blocked up, his heart hurts. His heart hurts.

 

Kuroo lets his hand fall. His gaze drifts away, back to sea.

 

“This place is familiar,” he says again, and now the paper cuts are turning into the tattoo-lines a blade leaves in your skin, drops of blood beading at the corners.

 

“But I don’t know why. I can’t remember, Tsukki. I can’t remember, I can’t remember, I just fucking  _ can’t. _ ” His voice is breaking up, now, cracks forming along the smooth mountain ridges like Atlas folding under the weight of the world. The warm timbre of his voice melting into the ground at their feet, revealing something helpless, something vulnerable, something raw.

 

Stubbornly, Kuroo keeps his eyes on the far wall. Not blinking. Not giving in.

 

_ There are different ways to lose the favor of the Flow. Like if you lose yourself. _

 

_ If you lose— _

 

All of a sudden Kei sees with stifling, heartrending clarity. The colors of every realm Kuroo has ever wandered into, staining the corners of his ocean-blue smile. The shape of his child-small self, carved in the likeness of the moon. The sound of every memory he has ever had to let go of, so he could live, so he could come out of the water again.

 

Kuroo doesn’t need an anchor to dive. He traded off ten years of his life for this horror, after all, of course he wouldn’t need an anchor,  _ of fucking course. _ But even the patience of the Flow has its limits. He has ten years’ worth of memories less than the rest of them. He has holes in his history, places where nothing will ever fit. He is an astronaut, tethered to nothing, with no candy trail to follow home. Nothing’s changed since the day he turned up in Tokyo like a natural disaster, hellbent on making everyone want him to death while he flirted with Saizeriya cashiers and traffic lights. Every time he looked out the window like he wanted to shatter the glass; every time he wandered off into the night in search of storybook shadows; every time he stared daggers at the sky like he wanted to cut a hole in the fabric of it and step right through to the other side— for all that he has done, for every sliver of Kei’s heart that he has ever stolen, Kuroo has never truly been  _ here. _

 

Even the patience of the Flow has its limits.

 

So Kuroo has had eight years, so Kei has had a little less, so they have gone into supermarkets and built castles out of toilet paper rolls and then talked about the stars and the galaxy and all that cheesy, overdone shit. None of it matters if the Flow is rejecting the existence, finally, of the boy without a past; his heart still wandering somnambulant even as he tries to keep his feet glued to the sidewalk.

 

Kei sees. Kei sees too much.

 

He swallows.

 

“Is this why you wouldn’t let me touch you.”

 

Kuroo still, still won’t look at him.

 

“I couldn’t risk it— the Flow was fucking up everything around me, I wasn’t diving right, the realms were getting all jumbled up— I couldn’t. Not with you.”

 

_ Not with you. _

 

Anger flares up in Kei’s chest, hot and quick. He takes another step forward, not caring that the boy across the room looks as thin as a shiver of moonlight.

 

“Why— Why didn’t you  _ say  _ anything?”

 

Kuroo, all long limbs and unruly hair, crossing deserts, crossing bridges made of starlight, crossing shaky wooden bridges suspended in the middle of nothing. Kuroo in a thin black shirt Kei doesn’t remember him owning, fingers drumming intricate, nameless rhythms into the hardwood of his seat, the silk of his silence. Kuroo, alone. Lonely. Always lonely.

 

Kei can’t be sad, so he lets the frustration take over instead. Everything is ablaze, smoke in his lungs and crowding over his vision, stuffing up his throat, making it hard to speak. They are standing in the room with red walls. There is no space for sadness to settle in when you can’t decide what you want to do with your hands. And your heart, which is breaking. And your heart.

 

He bites out, desperate, “You could’ve  _ told  _ me, Kuroo, you could’ve told _ anyone. _ I just, we just—”

 

“It’s not like  _ you _ ever asked me for help either, Tsukki, not like you ever _ fucking told me anything— _ ” Kuroo cuts in, eyes flashing. He’s gotten up from his seat. His hands are balled into fists at his sides. “I was always  _ there, _ all those years, always fucking  _ hoping _ you’d speak up first.”

 

There’s a taste in his mouth like he’s bitten off a clump of ashes. There’s a burn mark on his chest.

 

“You wanna know something? Fine. Fine, I’ll tell you something.” The words are out of his mouth before he knows it— measured, low, dangerous. They’ve lit the matches, both of them. They’ve thrown the gunpowder in the air.

 

He walks forward, footsteps heavy as thunder, until he’s face to face with Kuroo, whose fists are still clenched, who is shaking very slightly. Even now, Kuroo smells like hair gel and winter and sweet Osmanthus. Even now.

 

“I’ll tell you something,” Kei says, still hot, still burning. “The first time I saw you I thought you were an alien, because you looked at everything like it wasn’t real and you didn’t make a sound when you walked and you wouldn’t play with my dinosaur figurines with me.”

 

They are older now, harder now— made of granite, their bloody handprints littered all over the living room floor. Kuroo has to look up a little to see Kei, who has a few centimeters on him, eyes smoldering like coals beneath his lashes.

 

“When I was ten, I almost drowned in the community swimming pool near my old apartment. They got me out, but all I could remember afterwards was a song in my head and fear that didn’t belong to me. I’ve been terrified of swimming pools ever since.”

 

The apocalypse goes on. The universe is unforgiving in these ways. Even as their voices explode across the room like fireworks in the muted webwork of the sky, the world outside keeps crumbling, bits of brick and mortar and glass hitting the water, hitting the ground.

 

Kei hooks his fingers into the collar of Kuroo’s shirt and yanks him forward  _ hard, _ until there’s barely a breath of space between them. He leans in, the crumpled map of his whole body quaking.

 

“I’ll tell you something,” Kei chokes out, soft enough to set the whole world on fire.

 

“I’m in love with you.”

  
  


☉

  
  


If this were one of those dreams then Kei would disappear into a hole in the ground now, now that he’s said his piece. Alternatively, the room might fill up with water out of the blue like a ten-gallon fish tank, rendering both parties literally speechless.

 

If this were one of those dreams then it wouldn’t matter that Kei’s finally stopped running (figuratively) and Kuroo’s finally stopped hiding (literally). But this isn’t a dream, so neither of them is going anywhere no matter how hard Kei wishes for it. So Kei has to let go of Kuroo’s shirt.

 

Kuroo doesn’t say anything anyway. Kei’s eyes are a little bit damp at the corners. He tries to blink the wetness away, somewhat furious (or maybe just scared, and sad). It doesn’t work.

 

Traitor. Kuroo is still staring at him, which is unnerving, and the smell of sweet Osmanthus won’t go away. His hair looks absolutely hideous, like he hasn’t tried to do anything to it in days. Not that his usual attempts at taming it have ever worked in the long history of Kuroo’s insane and insanely attractive (because Kei is mad like that for him) bedhead, but this is somehow worse. How long has it been, again? Kei doesn’t know; Kei’s not sure if even Kuroo knows.

 

He isn’t used to being the one pushing forward and prodding at off-bounds conversation topics— it’s never really been his style. Kei has no tact whatsoever, and so to compensate for that he has spent most of his life sleepwalking. For most of his life, Kei has been a put-together individual, resolutely removed from the tornado mess of diving, confidently on his way to tertiary education at some award-winning institute far from the city, or maybe at the heart of it.

 

This is not, therefore, an accurate reflection of most of his life. He is both mad and upset, and now he is also  _ completely fucking out of it,  _ because there is a single tear inching its way down his cheek. Kei doesn’t cry, much in the same way Kuroo doesn’t let people think he’s anything but gorgeous. Kei never cries, and yet here they are. He stares at his feet.

 

“I still can’t touch you, right.” Kei wants to sound mean, and ends up sounding sad instead. Well, fuck. The truth’s out. Kuroo will never want to talk to him ever again, now that he knows about Kei’s stupid fucking feelings and the fucked up state of his thoughts. Kuroo probably doesn’t want to see anyone ever again anyway, seeing how long he has been in this room with the piano and the little bench, standing guard over a nameless patch of cemetery dirt.

 

Kuroo doesn’t say anything still, but his hands, which have been unclenched for a while now, don’t stop shaking. Kei doesn’t look at his face because he doesn’t think he’d be able to handle doing that. They don’t do anything.

 

After a moment, Kei catches the smallest shake of a head at the edge of his vision. His heart tries to claw its way out of his chest again like a signal flare, but dies down before it can get there.

 

You know what, fuck. He doesn’t care anymore. Kuroo can scold him later, if they survive this whole mess. The Flow doesn’t like Kuroo, Kei’s lost his anchor, whatever. You only live once. You only die once.

 

Kei touches him.

 

This is the short version of things. The long version is: Kei reaches out and slips his hand into Kuroo’s, which is cold and calloused. Kei reaches out and tries to stop the earthquake tremors, because he’s in love and the sky is white like snow and maybe they are both terrified. Maybe they are both terrified.

 

The long version is: Kei reaches out and touches Kuroo, and at the very moment in which their hands meet, the world goes silent.

 

This isn’t background music silence or empty apartment silence or even fading-away-because-you’re-literally-moving-further-and-further-from-me silence. This is a flip of the switch, the flashlight blinking off, the sharp snap of fingers.

 

Too shocked to remember that he’s still supposed to be heartbroken and in love, Kei meets Kuroo’s eyes. Too shaken to be sad, they look out the window.

 

The apocalypse has stopped.

 

Sometimes when you’re standing on the train platform of the  _ Yamanote  _ line at the asscrack of dawn, surrounded by dead tired students and more-dead-than-tired salarymen, there’s a moment. When neither train nor station announcement has yet to arrive, but you can tell that it’s on its way anyway. When you can feel the phantom-shaking of the ground beneath your feet, the telltale whistle of metal-on-metal.

 

Other times when you’re waiting for something, all the warning signs sail cleanly over your head and the next thing you know the automated doors are sliding open with the usual service announcement blaring through the speakers. All the students and salarymen lined up by the doors begin to filter into the carriage. None of them are saying a word. The unmistakable sense of impending something has vacated the train platform; it’s just you now. You, who was too busy staring at the sky to realize the world had passed you by.

 

So it’s just the two of them now. Standing in the middle of perfect, perfect silence, the clear turquoise ocean shimmering all around them. All the castle turrets and the skyscrapers and the bits and pieces of moondust frozen like a scene from a photograph, like they’re going to go back to breaking apart at any moment.

 

But they won’t. Nothing is crumbling now.

 

Here’s what Kei didn’t realize: when he almost drowned in the swimming pool that afternoon, oceans and deserts and light years away, in another realm, another boy was struggling in the water, too. In that single heartbeat of time, both of them were swept up by the Flow, swept into each other’s lives.

 

Here’s what Kei didn’t realize: In spite of all his misgivings about Kuroo, in spite of all those dreams where Kei fell down the rabbit hole and Kuroo rode off into the sunset on a shiny black motorcycle with a beautiful person behind him, he has always been less than an arm’s reach away. Closer to Kei than life; than death; than even Kuroo’s past, which he has lost forever. Kuroo has always been right in front of him.

 

So here’s what Kei didn’t mean to do, but ended up doing anyway: saving the whole damn world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> HI THERE DEAR READER. YOU'VE MADE IT SO FAR. I'M SO PROUD OF YOU. holy shit. we're finally on the final leg of operation Make Kei Suffer As Much As Is Possible. jesus. i can promise you, though, that the suffering is worth it, because this bad bitch just finished writing chapter 10 and i am officially done with the writing process and moving back into finals hell. bc i have nothing else to say, the pick n' mix lines were inspired by me discovering the ikea near my house has pick n' mix with all my favorites; i was so shook i was like fuck it im gonna write that shit in too  
> as always, thank you so so much for reading from the bottom of my weeping man heart. i love you all, like, this much (pointing at the sun) yeah That Much. all kudos, comments, and bookmarks are deeply appreciated! they keep me alive a little. the other thing that keeps me alive is my personal kink called: suffering. i'll see you guys on thursday, for chapter 9, which is part 1 if I Told You It'd Be Worth It, a novel by me
> 
> have a good one


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “—I don’t. I don’t need to know,” Kuroo interjects gently. “This is enough.”

The truth is, Kei has always been a little in love with Kuroo.

 

Somewhere between the first time he learned the shape of sadness in Kuroo’s small, proud shoulders and the last time they made a midnight trip to the  _ konbini _ for chips and cheap oden; somewhere between the impromptu visit to Ueno Zoo and the day they broke into the supermarket to dream those half-lit aisles to life; somewhere between Kuroo’s crooked smile and firecracker laugh, Kei fell.

 

He fell very, very hard. So hard, it became something to be embarrassed about, the way you try to cover up after you’ve tripped on the sidewalk. Kei was very embarrassed. More than that, he was afraid.

 

One day in summer it was so hot, even Kuroo gave up on trying to maneuver his way out of the situation like a silly, sly house cat. Frowning, he stumbled out into the literal frying pan of the street. Frowning even harder, and protesting loudly too, Kei was dragged out with him. They swept into the nearest store, paid for popsicles, and then stood outside in the shade, leeching off the occasional breath of cold air that escaped whenever the automated doors slid open.

 

Kei’s popsicle was strawberry-flavored. Kuroo’s was fizzy soda blue. Kuroo’s lips were also turning blue, very faintly. This, along with the way the melted syrup from his popsicle slid slowly down his chin, made it very hard for Kei to concentrate on his own sticky-sweet mess. He doesn’t remember much else about that day, except for the pretty sheen of Kuroo’s lips and the fact that his popsicle melted away almost completely, and Kuroo laughed at him for it.

 

—So the truth is, Kei has always been a little bit in love with Kuroo. As the indifferent hands of time ticked on, the space this feeling occupied in his heart grew in increments. Each increment was another day, another hour, another minute spent trying to pretend that no, he was not in love with Kuroo Tetsurou, and no, Kuroo did not really give a shit about him. Each day Kuroo would come up with a disturbingly fresh idea to annoy Kei with, and Kei would pretend to be duly annoyed instead of inexplicably flattered, because that was what Kuroo expected of him. It was both very easy and very hard.

 

He always thought these self-deprecative tendencies were reserved solely for boys with music box hearts and apocalyptic smiles; it turns out, after all, that he was wrong.

 

Because Kei was afraid. There existed in his head an image of Kuroo tearing down the streets on a motorcycle with Christmas light modifications on the wheels while some faceless, equally charming youth sat behind him, arms wrapped tight around his waist. There existed in his head an image of Kuroo, who was too loud to be real most days— Kei could only imagine someone like him paired off with the sun.

 

Kei was not the sun. Kei was the friend, the support character, the tour guide with the heart bleeding out all over the floor. He knew this mathematical equation well enough that he could insert it into any problem in the world, no matter how convoluted or nonsensical or seemingly unsolvable.

 

Kei could solve anything— he was good at these things. Good at keeping count.

 

Which is why he pushed Kuroo away. When the distance became too much for him to bear, when the tear in his heart threatened to turn into the kind of fault line that could give birth to earthquakes, he cut the thread first. Better to walk away, than to be the one left standing in the dust.

 

And yet the cold shoulder of the universe yanked him through a million different beat-up realms so he could arrive at this one. This nameless, night-less realm. This place, with all the answers.

 

Kei has always loved Kuroo. It’s that simple. It really is.

  
  


☉

  
  


Kei is never going to let go of Kuroo’s hand ever again. He decides this as the carnage of Kuroo’s spectral homeland stutters to a stop, the crunch of bones and teeth fading. Silence descends on them like a veil of stars. It makes them brighter.

 

Kei is never going to let go of Kuroo’s hand ever again, and that's that, because after they've looked from each other to the ocean outside and back to each other again, his hand stops shaking. His fingers tighten around Kei’s. 

 

“The world didn't end after all, dumbass,” Kei mumbles. He does not sound standoffish this time. He does not try to.

 

Somehow Kuroo finds it in himself to laugh. It's small and soft and completely different from his usual repertoire of laughs— Kei wants to cup it in his palms like you would hold a firefly, Kei wants to fall right into it.

 

“No, I guess not,” Kuroo says, then, “Can I hug you?”

 

Kei isn’t brave enough to look him in the eyes and nod at the same time, so he sticks to the nodding part alone. Not that it matters either way, because the next thing Kei knows Kuroo is  _ close close close _ and his arms are around him and everything is warm, and familiar, and lovely.

 

In a way, they deserve this: Kei has always been awkward about physical  _ anything, _ and lately Kuroo has been distant. It’s not as if their friendship has ever been overwhelmingly physical, like Bokuto and Kuroo, or Oikawa and Iwaizumi in the midst of their not-relationship. The simple fact of the matter is, knowing someone for eight years, even if you spend almost all of them in denial, can do a lot to change the landscape of your world. It can do a lot to change your mind.

 

They have always had these— small touches, careless brushes of skin. Kuroo’s chin on Kei’s head as he leans over the back of the sofa. Kei’s shoulder pressed against Kuroo’s because he is too tired to stay upright and too proud to say it out loud. Forehead flicks, elbow jabs, claps on the back.

 

It’s been months since Kuroo’s been this close. Kei traces the trajectory of the seasons with a practiced hand. Kuroo presses his face into the crook of Kei’s neck and inhales shakily. Kei lets him.

 

Kei lets him. Kei would pluck the sun out of the sky for him. Kei—

 

Breathes in sweet Osmanthus and thinks about the boy on the rooftop of their middle school. He finally allows himself to admit how much he has missed him, and this, too, is a weight off his shoulders, freeing him enough to return the gesture, to wrap his trembling arms around Kuroo. And Kuroo, for all he’s worth (which is everything, everything in the whole damn world), finally relaxes, melting like honey into Kei’s embrace.

 

They have always had this. The distance between them has always been the worst combination of physical and emotional, of unanswerable test questions and cryptic conversation. Only now are they finally beginning to learn how to navigate it.

 

“I fucking missed you,” Kuroo murmurs against Kei’s neck, doing all sorts of awful things to his heart. He is quite sure Kuroo can hear it, the hummingbird flutter of his pulse, the nervous offbeat rhythm. But then and again, it’s not as if there is anything left for Kei to hide. He presses his hands into the small of Kuroo’s back, feels the thrum of life in him through his shirt.

 

They don’t talk about  _ let me tell you something.  _ They don’t talk about  _ I’m in love with you.  _ There will be time for that later, after the skeleton of the world has been put back in its place. There will be time to talk about the delicate pink of Kuroo’s ears, later.

 

For now, Kei says, “I know.” Which means  _ I missed you too,  _ which Kuroo hears and understands, because he is Kuroo, because there are things tied up in knots between them that no one in any world has the power to tear apart.

 

He pulls back, gives Kei’s hand a small squeeze. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

 

Kei looks up, surprise spilling over into his face. “Are you sure? You still don’t know anything about your—”

 

“—I don’t. I don’t need to know,” Kuroo interjects gently. “This is enough.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Really.”

 

An image flashes through Kei’s mind, of hushed conversations under UFO patterned blankets, of short, stubby fingers and toothy smiles. Of wandering stars and what ifs. Of promises.

 

_ I'd go and pick you up. But only if you asked. _

 

Kei watches the white light bounce off the glass panels of the skyscraper outside. “Is this the part where I drag your stupid ass back to Tokyo?”

 

“I’m surprised you still remember that.” Kuroo grins crookedly.

 

_ I remember everything about you.  _ Kei shrugs the thought off. “You're missing something, though.”

 

“Hmm?”

 

“You haven't asked me to.”

 

“Do I have to?”

 

Kei raises an eyebrow. He rubs his thumb along the inside of Kuroo’s palm, and he twitches.

 

“Fine,” Kuroo finally says, petulantly, half a smile still plastered across his face. “Will you, o’ guiding hand of the universe, rescue me from this horrendous place and take me back to Tokyo?”

 

He clears his throat loudly. “It’s Tsukishima, actually. But I accept.”

 

Kuroo looks at him like he's the fucking sun.

  
  


☉

  
  


He figured that at some point eventually, it would have to be mentioned that Kei had lost his anchor, and therefore his own ticket home and Kuroo’s gift to him of a number of years. Therefore Kei, being the responsible young adult he is, decides to broach the topic once they've climbed out of the swimming pool and emerged back in  _ Hakoguni,  _ of all the realms.

 

Kei thinks, mildly, that Kuroo should make a bigger deal out of it, but when he says  _ I lost your whistle and also my anchor, as in, they are the same thing and the thing is gone, _ Kuroo just smiles like a sweet summer rain and says  _ you've got me,  _ as if that alone means it'll be all right, as if that makes up for everything.

 

It is a handsome smile. Kei has missed it very, very much, and almost tells him that, but he bites his lip at the last minute and pushes Kuroo’s hair out of his eyes instead. It is sopping wet and, weighed down with water, no longer defying gravity as valiantly as usual, making him look a little like a kicked kitten.

 

But anyway. Hakoguni. Hakoguni, which is most distinctly  _ not _ Tokyo, which is where Kei had, apparently foolishly, assumed they would be going.

 

Hakoguni. He asks Kuroo about it, once the matter of the missing anchor has been cleared up.

 

“Ushijima Wakatoshi,” Kuroo says quite reverently, leaving a trail of dark footprints behind him as he walks into the next box-room, “Was not just the most skilled coda diver at POOLS. He was  _ the _ diver.”

 

Kei follows suit, ducking his head in the doorway. They have stumbled upon a room which is as close to a replica of the executive lounge on the top floor of POOLS’ home base as is possible, considering that Kei hasn't been up there in years. The smooth marbled flooring, the dark leather armchairs— all of it is distantly familiar, like looking at something through frosted glass.

 

“And you know this because—?”

 

“Oikawa, and Sawamura, and Bokuto. But mostly Oikawa. Anyway, the man’s legendary, so I figured we should go see him.”

 

Kei hums thoughtfully. “Rather than legendary, I would call him intense.”

 

At this, Kuroo turns and  _ gapes _ at Kei. “Wait, don't tell me you've actually  _ met— _ ”

 

Ushijima Wakatoshi, whose strong eyebrows have officially been certified as legendary, chooses this exact moment to make his entrance. This happens via apparition in the doorway the duo had previously passed through, his stealth techniques so immaculately polished that neither notices him until he taps Kei firmly, but lightly, on the shoulder.

 

Kuroo, frozen with his mouth hanging open, continues to gape at him. Kei, too relieved about life in general, actually cracks a small smile.

 

“Ushijima,” he greets.

 

“Tsukishima Kei.” Ushijima nods in Kei’s direction, and then looks at Kuroo. “Kuroo. You have gotten very tall. I am glad to see that you are well.”

 

Kei reaches over and closes Kuroo’s mouth for him.

 

They  _ are _ in the fancy executive lounge of a generously funded organization, so it is perfect and perfectly hilarious when Ushijima, who to Kei’s knowledge was last fending off a hideous monster with a bicycle in its left shoulder, and Kei, who has finally stopped being constantly on the verge of crying or wanting to kiss Kuroo, sink down into the plush leather upholstery. They exchange pleasantries and casual conversation, through which Kei discovers that the monster of Hakoguni has finally settled down somewhat, and Ushijima learns of Kei’s penchant for almost getting himself killed.

 

Kuroo goes to the refreshments table and gets cake. This is an executive lounge, after all.

  
  


☉

  
  


Kei has no idea how this realm works, or of the precise mechanics that allow it to create carbon copies of its visitors’ memories. Half of him is curious; the other half is too busy savoring his strawberry shortcake to care. The latter wins. Or rather, he lets it.

 

The armchairs are just as comfortable as they were back when he was ten and incredibly confused about everything. He supposes it is a given, seeing how they have been constructed in accordance with the motion-blur of his childhood memories, but the give of the seat is strikingly authentic regardless. He leans back with his fork poised over his half-eaten cake, and listens.

 

“...So I know that  _ my _ existence was getting fucked over to high hell by the Flow, but what I still don't get is why everything stopped imploding when  _ Tsukki _ touched me,” Kuroo’s in the middle of saying. Kei’s sure he's said a lot of stuff before that, and probably afterwards too, but he’s almost finished his cake, and his eyelids are starting to droop. Maybe, just maybe, the strain of the week he’s spent on the run from his paper shredder destiny is finally catching up to him.

 

Ushijima leans forward in his seat. “You said you were ten when you first got lost in the Flow?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“And you and Kei are two years apart?”

 

Again: “Yeah.”

 

Dimly, Kei thinks they might be on the brink of another revelation. That’s all he’s gotten lately, punch after punch to the face in the form of free-falls, feelings, pretty hands wrapped in bloody bandages. Revelations.

 

Dimly, Kei thinks, and then decides that he doesn’t want to anymore. Whatever. He’ll wonder about it later, when he’s less tired, when his limbs feel less like Jell-o. He’ll see Ushijima’s eyebrows again later, at which point he will thank him properly for the immeasurably valuable advice and for keeping Kuroo occupied while Kei’s vision flickers with static.

 

Whatever. He closes his eyes.

  
  


☉

  
  


Once upon a time, there were two boys. Two boys, two realms; an old, sad song on the radio. Then one disappeared, so the other boy left on a journey to find him. A journey of the life-changing sort.

 

Once upon a time, there were two boys.

  
  


☉

  
  


He does not, in fact, get to see Ushijima’s eyebrows later, because the next time he opens his eyes the closed-room interior of Hakoguni is gone. In its place is a bubblegum pink sky, glossy like the surface of an inflated balloon, like nail polish.

 

“What the fuck,” Kuroo is yelling from somewhere close by. It’s probably what woke him. Kei sits up, finds himself on a pale, aquamarine beach.

 

“What the fuck,” Kuroo yells again. He sounds rather unstressed for someone who’s essentially hollering at the top of his lungs, which is a good thing. And a weird thing.

 

This whole place is weird. Kei keeps smelling lavender, but there aren’t any flowers in sight as far as he can tell— just the beach around him, and then a rich indigo sea beyond that, waves lapping rhythmically at the sand. Kuroo is standing on the shoreline, bare feet sending wet clumps of sand flying whenever he moves. His shoes and socks are discarded a way off.

 

“Kuroo,” Kei calls, standing up.

 

The way that Kuroo turns and looks at him, you’d think that he’s discovered all the secrets of the universe in his eyes. It makes a part of Kei’s heart that he didn’t even know existed clench painfully. It makes Kei want to go back to being asleep on the beach, back to being blissfully out of touch with the train wreck of reality, where the color of the sky depends on who you are and beautiful boys are only slightly out of reach.

 

They haven’t talked about  _ let me tell you something _ or  _ I’m in love with you _ yet. They still haven’t.

 

“Tsukki,” Kuroo calls back, still standing at the water’s edge.

 

“Tsukki,” he says, louder. “Ushijima’s a fucking genius.  _ You’re _ a fucking genius.”

 

The last time Kei checked, the only genius here was Kuroo, with his stellar grades and hideous classroom conduct and bizarre, screwed-up relationship with the Flow. The last time Kei checked, he was just a nameless face in the support cast.

 

_ I’m in love with you. _ Kuroo won’t bring it up because his response is something that will hurt even more than the way he looks at Kei with his hooded eyes and his lips curved up in a stupid, sloppy smile. Kei is good at calculations and math, Kei knows these things. The image in his head of Kuroo and his Christmas tree motorcycle has not gone away.

 

“I’m not,” he returns, raising his voice slightly so it travels above the sequin-sounds of the sea. It’s always the sea, no matter where they are. Always these turbulent waters, prying them apart and then bringing their bruised selves back together.

 

“Do you believe in soulmates?” Kuroo shouts, then. It’s completely non-sequitur.

 

“Not really,” Kei shouts back.

 

Kuroo laughs, and even from here it’s the best fucking thing Kei’s ever heard. Every time Kuroo laughs, Kei’s heart does a gymnastics floor routine so good, it would probably win gold at the next Olympics. Every time Kuroo laughs, Kei dies a little inside.

 

“I don’t either! But, you know, it almost feels like you walked out of a story just so that we could find each other. I mean— you  _ found _ me.  _ You _ found  _ me. _ ”

 

Kei squints at Kuroo, whose figure is beginning to go soft around the edges in the pink light. “I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

 

“Don’t you get it?” Kuroo, coming from mountains, oceans, deserts away, coming from the other side of the universe. His bare feet whispering across the sand even though he’s running like the wind, even though he’s running.

 

“When you almost drowned in the pool that day, I was real busy getting pulled into the undertow, losing all my memories, all that shit. And the Flow connects  _ everything, _ right, so in that moment when I forgot about myself, even though it was realms away, you were there too. You were there.  _ We fell into the water at the same time, _ Tsukki.”

 

_ When Kei was eight. When Kuroo was ten. When they were both struggling, both gasping for air. _

 

So maybe Kei doesn't get it immediately, because Kuroo’s being silly and vague and the indigo of the sea behind his fast-approaching form is terribly distracting. He doesn't get it, because there’s simply too much to process between the lavender scented air and the enormity of what Kuroo’s trying to say, obscured as it is behind the incredulous lilt of his voice.

 

There isn't a final puzzle piece to slide into place, no satisfying  _ click _ when the edges align and the complete image stares back at him serenely. There isn't another revelation.

 

But then and again, they have never been about reaching the end of the story. Growing up with Kuroo was about crowbars and back alleys and conversations in the twilight, popsicles melting in the summer heat. Growing up with Kuroo was about the rush of cold air in your face as you ran the last few meters to get to the other side of Shibuya crossing, his hand a reassuring warmth in yours. Growing up with Kuroo was about being breathless, breathlessly in love with everything.

 

And Kei is. Kei is— Kei is in love with all of this. There isn't a final puzzle piece to snap into place because this was never about solving the riddle, it was about finding the boy in the back aisle of the  _ konbini _ at the end of the street. It's all right if there isn't another revelation, if Kei’s mind is too wound up and overwhelmed to understand. Kei still has his heart, which  _ feels. _

 

His heart feels, and that’s enough.

 

Kuroo comes at him flying, knocking him over so he’s flat on his back in the sand, with Kuroo on top of him, straddling his torso, hands on his chest.

 

“Thank you,” he murmurs, the words barely there in the charged air between them. His hair is windswept and all over the place. His cheeks are rouge red. He says  _ thank you,  _ and means so many impossibly kind things that Kei gets lost in his head trying to sort them out.

 

“I didn't do anything,” Kei breathes, because he's eighteen and stupid and he doesn't know the first thing about painting sunrises pink, because he can.

 

Kuroo shakes his head and leans in and says, “You did, idiot.”

 

_ The Flow connects  _ everything.  _ Even boys with hands full of different galaxies. Even boys like these. _

 

Sometimes Kei wishes he'd met the boy who lived in the apartment block across the street from his big empty home, instead of the one who fell out of the sky and then turned Tokyo into his personal playground. The boy across the street would give him all the space he needed and help him out when Kei found the courage to ask for it. The boy across the street would cry at the end of every Disney movie and look unimpressed at Kimi no Na Wa. The boy across the street would hide secrets and sugary sweet smiles in the palms of his hands, turned down towards the ground.

 

Sometimes Kei wishes he knew how to let go. He has known all his life, even before he came to terms with the fact that something existed there at all, that his heartache would always be a one-sided affair.

 

Maybe in another world, Kei learns to let go. Maybe in another world, Kuroo never crashes into Tokyo and Kei finds another friend to while away the lonely afternoons with.

 

Not in this one. In this one Kuroo’s grin softens like how Morinaga caramels go all gooey when you've left them for too long in your pocket, the bow-curve of his lips mellowing like an ocean wave as it nears the coast. In this one, he shakes his head and leans in closer than he's ever been when both of them have their eyes wide open even though Kei’s never let him do this, never let his own dreams crawl that far out of the gutter.

 

In this one, Kuroo keeps talking:

 

“But I’m an even bigger idiot, because I'm in love with you.”

 

_ Oh. _

 

(They are only eighteen and twenty, still innocent, still carrying dreams too big for their clumsy, catastrophic hearts.)

 

Kei’s mind goes blank for a second, and then three, and then five more. The world spins on its axis, shuddering like the beginnings of an earthquake. The smell of lavender doesn't go away.

 

He feels light suddenly, like he’s full of helium and made of clouds. Kuroo is completely red and also smiling like  _ he  _ is the end of the world here to send Kei straight to his death. His vision fogs over. He thinks it is exceedingly rude of his own body to do this, to betray him in such a trying time by trying to float right into the bubblegum pink sky, and yet he cannot find it in himself to stay grounded. He must be falling apart from the inside out. That's it.

 

Because really, he has no idea what to do with himself now. All his life he has had blueprints for every step across the road. All his life he has bad blueprints, and now Kuroo is determined to take all of that away from him. Kuroo is determined to give him something else. Something—

 

Kei is in a state of disbelief. “You're in love with me,” he echoes faintly. The sequin-sounds of the sea have become very small. Very distant. He can hear every single one of Kuroo’s quick, fluttery breaths.

 

“I’m in love with you,” Kuroo confirms, and Kei doesn't know how he managed to miss it, but his voice doesn't sound exactly like that stupid old piano song on the radio no one ever listens to anymore. It sounds rawer, more real, close enough to Kei that it could crawl right inside of him if he let it. He would let it. He would let Kuroo carve his heart right out of him if he wanted to.

 

For now, he focuses on how Kuroo is so very, very close. Enough that Kei can see the melted butter of his eyes, the slope of his nose, the fall leaf tremble of his lips. Enough that his head is full of stars now.

 

“And you—” Kuroo start-stops, unsure of himself for once. His expression wavers minutely.

 

Kei is only eighteen. He has known Kuroo for eight of those years, but if he's going to be completely honest with himself, then it's never been enough. None of this has ever been— what he wanted, what he wished for, what he dreamed about in the darkness of his bedroom with the glow-in-the-dark stars winking down at him from the ceiling, Kuroo’s pretty piano hands a mere daydream away. Kei has always wanted quietly, deeply, with all of him.

 

Kei has always wanted with his whole heart, which is a fragile, fleeting thing. He is done with putting things on hold. He is done with putting himself on hold. So he takes a deep breath, the way you do before you jump into the deep end of the swimming pool, and asks:

 

“Can I kiss you?”

 

Kuroo startles and recovers in the same hiccup of time, and then flashes Kei an apocalyptic smile that’s so wide it’s going to split the sky in half. It’s the same one he discovered when he was twelve years old, and a boy with fifty-two dinosaur figurines showed him that there were places in the world for even the most scarred hands to be. It’s the one that stings like a firecracker.

 

“I’m all yours,” Kuroo replies, because he’s dramatic like that, and then ruins the whole dramatic edge to his words when his voice cracks at the end. It  _ cracks. _

 

Kei could care less. Kei could care so much less and so much more, and in this moment Tokyo is light years away but Kuroo is right here, alive and breathing and smiling all over again. He does that. He smiles. He lights things up.

 

Kei props himself up on his elbows, and presses their lips together.

 

It turns out they're  _ both _ dramatic like that, and it's perfect, and Kei kisses him and kisses him and Kuroo’s lips are soft and dry and chapped because he’s been yelling at the fucking ocean for God knows how long, but they’re also sweet— kissing Kuroo is so sweet, Kei thinks he’s going to melt. It’s not fair. No one should be this breathtakingly beautiful, no one should have this much power.

 

Except he is, anyway. This is Kuroo at the end of the war, Kuroo after the sun has gone down and the stars have all come out, hidden behind the thick film of the city’s light pollution. This is Kuroo, who kisses a little clumsily and a little messily because he’s never kissed anyone before, because he’s never let himself kiss anyone before. This is Kuroo, the astronaut, the wandering star.

 

Kissing Kuroo is like riding a roller coaster without a seatbelt. In other words: like free falling.

 

When they finally break apart, Kuroo’s eyes are wet. Kei’s eyes are wet. Kei’s face is wet, and Kuroo’s hands are cupping his cheeks with the kind of tenderness that he's only ever read about in stories, as if Kei’s made of moonlight.

 

He rolls over onto his side, pulling Kuroo down with him so they're facing each other, curled up like two commas. It's a little gross, how the sand sticks to his elbows and his clothes, all gritty and rough against his skin. It's a little gross, terribly unromantic, and he doesn't care at all.

 

Kei is eighteen. His heart is finally here.

 

“Awfully handsy today, aren't we?” Kuroo quips cheerfully, still close enough that Kei can make out the flutter of his eyelashes every time he blinks. Still smiling.

 

“Shut up,” Kei says, and kisses him again.

  
  


☉

  
  


Years later, someone will ask him how it all began, and Kei will say  _ he told me he loved me. _

  
  


☉

  
  


Afterwards, they stand up and dust themselves off. Kuroo shakes his head and sends sand flying in an arc around him, and Kei is reminded of how cats try to get dry after unwanted showers.

 

Silently, he heads to the water’s edge. Kei joins him.

 

“It always looked nicer when I wasn’t in it.” Kuroo gazes out at the endless, endless indigo. His voice is carelessly light, but his gaze is landlocked; for the first time, he doesn't look like he wants to disappear off somewhere.

 

Kei takes his hand, and rubs gently at his bent pinky. The sea breathes in deep inhales and shallow, stuttering exhales, frothing up with fluorescent soap bubbles where each wave meets the next undulating current.

 

After a minute, he turns away.

 

“Let’s go home,” Kei says.

 

“Yeah,” Kuroo agrees.

 

So they go.

  
  


☉

  
  


This is what Kei knows:

 

Nothing’s been the same since the day Kuroo turned up in Tokyo like a natural disaster, hellbent on making everyone fall in love with him while he sipped cherry soda from a pink straw. The sweet old lady who owns the dollar store outside Ebisu station fell a little in love with him. The cashier who works Monday afternoons at Dominique Ansel Bakery fell a little in love with him.

 

Kei fell in love with him with half his terrified heart, and then with all of it.

 

But this is what Kei’s never dared to think about, what Kei’s only ever wondered about at night, when the stars come out, hidden under the light pollution of the city. Here's what Kei didn't know:

 

When he fell, Kuroo did, too. Kuroo did, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)  
> woo  
> we're almost there. just 1 more chapter. i call it the half assed i tied everything up but only sort of chapter. it is a chapter. this has been a chapter. this has been a story too!  
> thank you for reading from the bottom of my heart, dear reader, you have truly survived a lot of draggy writing and i appreciate you with all my might. as always, every kudo, comment, and bookmark makes me grin like a whole dumbass. i will see you guys most likely on saturday (or maybe earlier? depends on how impatient i get, i suppose), for the final installment of all this fuckery(TM)
> 
> have a good one


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [here is my final gift to you all](https://open.spotify.com/user/11186251434/playlist/3UPKb9jtrS5ePcHsjNGwdl?si=zdk2pRPXTiuMYIqsmyxh4A)

The world doesn’t come to a standstill when Kuroo Tetsurou goes missing.

 

The call comes in from Yamaguchi at a little past nine o’clock in the morning. This is fairly late for both of them, seeing how it is a weekday, but Kei is still blissfully asleep beneath his pile of UFO-patterned blankets when his phone goes off. The morning after a journey of the life-changing sort is always a tragedy in the making, never mind that spring has already begun to grace the concrete city with its nurturing touch. At least winter is finally backing off— Kei is cold, but not horribly so. Kei is always cold. Therefore, on the sliding scale of his tolerance this is still bearable.

 

Frankly speaking, he doesn't want to pick up. He’d been chewed out completely by his parents when he was caught trying to enter the house through the balcony last night, partially because of the balcony thing, but mainly because of his two-week absence.

 

“It's only been two weeks?” Kei had asked, incredulous.

 

“Don’t try and play this down, young man,” his mother replied, then, her voice pitched dangerously low. “Two weeks is a  _ long ass time _ to be gone without telling anyone.”

 

_ I did tell someone, actually, quite a few someone’s, _ Kei thought, and did not say aloud. He then focused all of his energy on not shifting his weight around on his feet too much, while she gave him the longest lecture ever made in the history of the Tsukishima family, his father doing nothing much except standing beside her and nodding with conviction on occasion, Akiteru gone off to some far end of the universe as usual. His mother has always believed that fidgeting is a sign of weakness; Kei did not wish to incur any more of her wrath. He figured he would die if that happened.

 

After the house and its residents finally cooled down (“You could have  _ died, _ young man,” his mother said, and Kei agreed wholeheartedly. He  _ had _ indeed come very close to dying.), he went to sleep at something like three in the morning, too tired to even take off his socks.

 

Six hours later, those socks are still pulled snug over his ankles. He is still too tired to do the whole  _ life _ thing. He doesn't want to pick up the phone.

 

He does, anyway.

 

“Good morning, Tsukki!” Yamaguchi sounds far too alive for a Friday morning. Kei takes offense immediately.

 

“ _ Yamaguchi. _ ” He sits down on the edge of his bed, stares down at the floor. There's a dinosaur sticker embedded in a crack between two floorboards; he got it stuck in there years ago and only managed to push it further in the more he tried to get it out. It was a sad affair— the sticker was of his favorite brachiosaurus, after all. The shiny plastic film is all faded and scratched up now.

 

“Have you seen Kuroo around?”

 

Ushijima had assured them that Kuroo’s existence would no longer be liable to fading away at the blink of an eye, but Kei feels the rush of relief all the same when his name comes out of Yamaguchi’s mouth without additional prompting.

 

“Yeah,” Kei says, and then adds very helpfully, “He's in Tokyo.”

 

Yamaguchi laughs. “No, really though _._ The crew back at home base is ready to wring his ass dry, but no one has any idea where the hell he is.”

 

They'd returned in the dark of the previous night, the city rustling around them as two wanderers, gone for too long, finally set foot on dry land again. For a moment neither seemed ready to move, for they were so deeply immersed in the reassuring timelessness of Tokyo. Eventually, and reluctantly, Kei let go of Kuroo’s hand. Eventually, they parted ways. And then Kei tried to climb back into his bedroom on the second floor and failed, and his mother chewed both his ears off so he would never be able to get the helix piercings he’d secretly coveted for years, and he hit his bed like a brick, and promptly passed the fuck out.

 

“I don't know either,” Kei tells him quite honestly. He wonders if Kuroo is awake now. He wonders if he is allowed to wonder, and then decides that the answer is yes.

 

“That's surprising.” Yamaguchi’s voice is teasing, almost expectant, but he doesn't wait for Kei to respond before continuing. “Well then, I guess they’ll just have to settle for the other half of the couple.”

 

Kei clears his throat pointedly. “Are you talking about me?”

 

“Yup!”

 

“Unlike you, Yamaguchi, I actually have class today.”

 

“You're not going, though.” It's not a question. Silently, Kei wonders when he became this transparent, this easily seen through in the early morning sunshine.

 

“I am not going,” he confirms, continuing the unprecedented streak of candidness.

 

“Cool! I’ll see you there then.”

 

Yamaguchi hangs up just like that, leaving Kei sitting on his bed in the same pair of socks, staring at the thin film of dust that has settled over everything.  _ Only two weeks. _

 

Thinking of the symphony of outdoor voices waiting for him at home base, he allows himself a single resigned sigh, and then gets to his feet. He’s got a plan of action for the morning. It starts with this: standing under hot water in the shower for a good hour, pouring himself a bowl of cereal, and savoring the wonders of being alive, and home, and safe.

  
  


☉

  
  


His white headphones are exactly where he last left them, discarded on his desk with the wires all tangled up and the headphone jack bent at a precarious angle. Kei picks them up after he’s showered, worries at the nicks in the otherwise smooth plastic.

 

In the end, Kuroo had accepted that he wasn’t ever going to get those ten years back.  _ I’ve got Tokyo now, anyway, _ he said, balanced in the dead center of a swaying wooden-planks-and-rope bridge, arms extended straight out on either side of him. Fundamentally speaking, Kei understood his rationale. He both respected Kuroo’s decision and felt an inexplicable amount of relief when he brought up Tokyo like a lighthouse— it is the city they grew up in, after all, and Kei has always been a little in awe— yet there was a heaviness in his chest he couldn’t quite dislodge. It felt a little like getting gum stuck on the underside of your shoe, if the shoe was your heart and the gum weighed a hundred kilograms.

 

Kuroo still has a voice like an old, sad song on the radio, but it’s different, somehow. The quality of it is less distorted now, clear like water from the bottom of a well, light as daybreak. He no longer sounds like he’s talking to Kei from the other end of a very long tunnel where the world only exists at one end. He no longer sounds so sad.

 

Rather, the cadence of it, rich and smooth, feels nostalgic. Half of it reminds Kei of the crumbling stone castle in the realm of bleached white skies, but the other half is vividly, viscerally real. If middle school, high school, coda diver Kuroo had been fighting the urge to crack the sky open every other minute, then the Kuroo now has finally come to terms with himself. With all of it— all his disappearing acts, all his little magic tricks. Kuroo has always had a penchant for drawing one’s attention away from the things he keeps secret like lovers eloping in the night; Kei knows this, too.

 

It is still a beautiful voice nonetheless.  _ What about that song, _ Kei had asked while Kuroo led him by the hand through the hustle and bustle of the marketplace on the moon, nothing more than a blur of black and white in front of him. In their periphery stall owners stuck their heads out from under intricate canopies like roosters determined to wake the entire world up. Kei hardly paid them any attention.

 

_ It’s just a song, _ Kuroo replied, and then turned the corner, forcing Kei to push harder through the hectic flow of bodies to keep up.

 

Kuroo was not wrong. Kuroo is not wrong. About this, at least, if nothing else, and Kei is aware of that, too. He understands and respects his decision, and a fraction of his heart is still deeply glad that Kuroo still had it in him to return to Tokyo after the mess of everything that had happened.

 

_ Would you play the piano for me if I asked you to, _ Kei asked again, later, wiping sweat from his brow while he trudged up and down the sloping sand dunes of the dead.

 

At that, Kuroo turned around, his grip on Kei’s hand tightening a little.

 

_ Are you asking me to? _

 

_ Yes. _

 

_ Sure. _

 

Kei is glad with every single fiber of his being. He only wishes he knew the name of that song. It is a lovely song, now that they have left all the swimming pools in all the worlds behind. It is a love song.

 

Kei, who has only recently started allowing himself to appreciate love songs without having to turn away with a petulant frown on his face, finally allows himself to admit that he likes it a lot, too. Enough that he thinks that maybe he will do something with it— play around with the accompaniment, add to the texture of the main melody, give it a name.

 

Maybe Kei will make the song theirs, so it stops being a radio thing and starts being a Kuroo and Kei thing. He thinks Kuroo, who can play the piano after all, and does so handsomely, might like that.

 

He plugs the headphone jack into his phone, shrugs on Kuroo’s red bomber jacket, and walks out of the room.

  
  


☉

  
  


The fortieth floor of the glittering glass skyscraper that is POOLS’ home base is  _ obscenely _ lively today. Even all the floor-to-ceiling windows can't quite contain the sheer excitement bristling inside, cacophonous like the beginnings of a storm that hits Kei square in the chest as he steps out of the elevator lobby.

 

The figurative hit, however, is nothing like the physical sensation of getting assaulted by at least five different people at once, all of them blissfully shorter than Kei so he gets an unsteady view of nothing but bobbing heads of hair while he is hugged, prodded at, and pinched. One of them pulls back, sniffling a bit.

 

“I thought you weren’t ever coming back,” Yachi warbles. She’s just barely managing to hold back what Kei knows are genuine tears, clutching quite determinedly at his jacket. Yachi, who cries when kittens mewl and needs a minute afterwards to pull herself back together, only knows how to shed genuine tears. She sheds them generously, because everything matters in equal amounts to her.

 

Kei is just about to give her his best, most heartfelt version of a  _ comforting reply _ when Sawamura cuts in, grinning fiercely. “Welcome back, Tsukishima three-day trip to the Bahamas Kei. That was a very long three days. Your mother is a fearsome lady.”

 

Kei smiles back at him, not quite sure what to say, not quite sure how much they all know. This is the fortieth floor of home base, the divers’ floor, where people congregate for late night movie marathons and donut parties when they aren't all off on a billion different missions. This is the floor he knows best. These are the people he knows best.

 

Yachi finishes sobbing into his shirt and detaches herself from his torso, only for Hinata’s brilliant smile to replace her and shoot a sunbeam right through his skull. Hinata reaches up and pats the top of Kei’s head, smoothing his hand over his curly hair.

 

Kageyama, who is not that far off, frowns at him, saying with abject suspicion, “I swear I saw a glimpse of you like last week.” He puts a hand on Kei’s shoulder gingerly, still frowning, and then retreats behind Hinata. This doesn't do much given the latter’s height, but does have the effect of making Hinata look like he has his own personal vengeful spirit, hovering just above the crown of his head.

 

“You're a brilliant asshole,” Oikawa says over their heads, sauntering, or rather, spinning on his swivel chair in a way that looks like he's sauntering anyway, over to join the party. It's a very large party, very lively, all of them intent on making round two of Chew Kei Out for His Bad Life Decisions as sweet as it can be. For them. It's not that sweet for Kei, although he wouldn't call it a horrible experience. It's not  _ that  _ sweet.

 

Oikawa inserts himself between Bokuto, who wants to know what the hell Kei did in the last two weeks, and Yachi, who has resumed the whole sobbing into someone’s shirt affair, except it is now Yamaguchi’s shirt at her mercy. He smiles at Kei, superficially sharp but somehow still warm under all that peach-scented lip gloss.

 

“Says the asshole,” Kei replies mildly, wincing as Sugawara throws an affectionate and protective arm around his shoulder and Sawamura tries to discreetly launch a kick at him for the third time in ten minutes.

 

Oikawa nods, acknowledging the compliment. “But today your brilliance outshines even mine,” he declares grandly, and then leans forward on the back of his chair, reaching up to punch Kei in the shoulder. “Good job on bringing our lost kitty home.”

 

“And not dying yourself!” Bokuto adds, because he is all about that life, and then pulls Kei into a bone-crushing hug which puts the rest of the world to shame yet again.

 

“It feels great to be alive,” Kei says, half sarcastic, half honest. Oikawa rolls away on his swivel chair, and in the brief moment in which Kei can see through the throng of bodies he glimpses Kenma, sitting with his legs crossed on someone’s desk near the front.

 

“Do you still have all the gear I lent you,” Kenma asks quite placidly, mysteriously aware of Kei’s eyes on him even though he’s clicking away on his PSP, just as someone else yells  _ no one’s ever survived out on the bloody Helios bridge without proper training before I still can’t believe you _ into his ear.

 

“Sorry, I kind of lost everything,” he says, hoping his voice will carry.

 

Kenma doesn't look bothered, but then and again, Kenma rarely looks bothered about anything when it doesn't involve some form of Bokuto and Kuroo’s bullshit. He had been very perturbed by the penguin the two snuck into the swimming pool that time. Today there are no penguins, and therefore there is no reason for him to be even remotely worried about the comings and goings of the universe.

 

“Don't worry about it,” he mumbles, taking his hand off his controller for a second to gesture vaguely in Kei’s direction.

 

So Kei stops worrying about it. Kei stops worrying about everything, and lets himself drift a bit in his head while he is tugged around like an especially well-loved stuffed animal by his friends. He looks beyond the disbelief still painted across all of their faces and sees the bruises fading from Oikawa’s skin as he attempts to flirt with Iwaizumi for the hundredth time, Iwaizumi’s face pinking even as his expression remains stoic. He sees Hinata’s hands, steadier now from hours spent handling porcelain cups and coffee machines, resting firmly on Yachi’s shoulders, and Kageyama’s uneven, floppy-disc smile as he tries to get her to stop crying alongside the other. He sees Sawamura, still wailing on about how his little crow kid could have  _ died _ in the Upside Down with all those nasty creatures, his shirt wrinkled where Sugawara is pulling at it, laughing pretty and bell-like even as he tries to calm him down.

This is the fortieth floor of home base, which is the floor he knows best. These are the people he knows best. Secretly, silently, Kei allows himself a smile. Just one.

  
  


☉

  
  


“Tsukishima— catch.” Oikawa throws something at him from across the now-empty kitchen area, squatting in the rectangle of light emitting from the communal fridge.

 

Kei catches it with one hand, closing his fingers around condensation-cold aluminum. It's a can of Arizona green tea. Stuck to the side, slightly wet, is a yellow Post-It with the name  _ Tsukishima _ scribbled across it.

 

“I wanted to give that to you,” Oikawa nods at him sagely. In that single gesture Kei sees approval, pride, some kind of childish joy.

 

“Thank you,” Kei says. He pulls the tab off.

 

At this, Oikawa turns around, knees drawn up in front of him on the floor. He studies Kei, who is leaning against the counter. “Frankly speaking, I didn't think you'd be able to do it.” His nails are perfectly manicured crescent moons, shining delicately. “But you did.”

 

Kei shrugs. Oikawa smiles.

 

“I don't think you'll have to come crying to me or anyone else, anymore. I think you've figured out enough of the world. Mapped out enough bullshit.”

 

They stay like that for a while, not speaking, soaking in the silence. The fridge starts singing, the way fridges do when you leave their doors open for too long, so Oikawa shifts aside and lets it fall shut. Then he stands up, brushing nonexistent dust motes off his hideous neon-print tank top. He breezes past Kei, and as he does so, says offhandedly, “Ushiwaka-chan hasn't aged a day. He's like a vampire.”

 

Kei acknowledges this, and then watches as Oikawa vanishes down an aisle, humming the theme song of an old movie.

  
  
  


☉

  
  


Kei stands corrected. Arizona green tea tastes all right. He is in the middle of appreciating the subtlety of its near-invisible taste, when he bumps into Bokuto in the lobby.

 

They haven't even spoken yet, and already Bokuto is beaming at him, teeth flashing. “I’ve got something I think you might be interested in! He said you would be interested in it, at least.” The halo of light surrounding him gets brighter by about eighty notches.

 

Kei’s about to ask who this ‘he’ is, but before he can do that Bokuto’s shoving something into his hands, enthusiastic as ever, and then walking away just as enthusiastically. Kei is left standing on the marble floor of the lobby, holding a slim edition from the archives upstairs. It is so pristine, the cover so perfectly unmarred, that he wonders if it has been even a week since this was brought in. There are many, many records left in the archives, full of dinosaurs, interplanetary civil wars that have lasted for millennia, and ghosts, and all of them are real. There are many, many records in the archives of POOLS. Kei has read all of them.

 

He hasn't read this one. Stepping out into the afternoon light, Kei wonders what kind of story it has to tell. He hopes it's a good story.

  
  


☉

  
  


Akiteru, who is still a traitor, greets him from the living room at home. He isn't wearing that peculiar combination of shock and relief that everyone else has had on at least to some extent, so Kei deduces that one of them must have clued him in earlier. It’s to be expected, really. A lot of things should have been expected in the history of the comings and goings in his life, and yet Kei had foreseen none of them, so the fault is mostly his.

 

“How was your vacation?” Akiteru asks, head tilted up against the back of the sofa.

 

“As you already know, I almost died,” Kei says blandly. He stands in the hallway with his hands at his sides, ready to retreat back into his bedroom but trapped under his brother's piercing stare.

 

“What about the rest?” The look Akiteru gives him is quietly expectant. It's the sort of look that means  _ you can tell me if you want to, I promise I’ll listen. _ It's the sort of look that offers him a choice.

 

Kei doesn't reply immediately. He thinks about Akiteru’s big city dreams, the engineering degree he had spoken of with awe bursting like fireworks across his child-young face, the way he described rush hour in Tokyo, all the more-dead-than-tired office workers slotted like pancakes into the train carriages. He thinks about  _ most people. _

 

Their family has never been  _ most people. _ This was impressed upon him on bring your kid to work day when he was eight, his mother and father on either side of him, their big adult hands anchoring him to the ground. It does not mean that Kei has always been proud.

 

There are a lot of things that Kei should have expected, and they start with the part where all his childhood playmates mysteriously transformed into divers at POOLS without him realizing it. In the middle is a small segment of time, devoted to Kuroo’s return to the study of wandering. At the end, is Akiteru.

 

No, the truth is, at the very beginning of it all, the real beginning, before Kei became the last familiar face from the past at his high school, was Akiteru. He'd never expected Akiteru to become a diver. Not him, too.

 

But perhaps it's time that Kei re-examined his expectations towards the whole damned universe. Lately, everything has been a brick to the face or a knee in his stomach. Lately, everything has been a surprise.

 

“It was… Interesting,” Kei replies, the words stilted, not quite flowing the way his usual snarky commentary does. He meets Akiteru’s gaze, his own flickering with uncertainty, and finds that his brother’s expression hasn't changed. It is still expectant, still quiet.

 

He keeps talking. “There was a desert with actual ghosts in it, and it was so hot I thought I'd die.” He keeps talking. “I bought bombs that were definitely illegal and then threw them at armed guards with knives and everything.” He keeps talking. “There was a realm where everything was upside down— One full of boxed-up rooms— A weird world with a white sky. There was an indigo sea that smelled like lavender. It really smelled like lavender, no matter where I walked in that realm. I couldn't get the smell off of me.”

 

He doesn't say  _ there was a boy, _ but he suspects Akiteru knows that anyway. Akiteru has always been too good at reading him, even across the ravine that Kei dug between them.

 

Akiteru has always been there, and the truth is that before Kuroo came crashing into his life like a meteor, it was his brother who spread his arms out as wide as the sky and told Kei about the ghosts in Archimedes and the dinosaurs whose smooth hide he could run his hands across if he dived deep and far enough. Kei has been trying to put those stories behind him for years now. Kei has been putting his dinosaur figurines away since forever.

 

Today, he keeps talking. He names every place he visited and then goes beyond that, talks about Shimizu’s cool confidence and Ushijima’s eyebrows, he tells Akiteru about the shitty infrastructure of the Upside Down and how he thought he was going to die again. He thought he would die so many times, he lost track. Always, there was fear gnawing at the back of his mind. Always, he wondered.

 

Without his realizing, it he’s gravitated towards the sofa and then sat down on it as well.  _ Whatever, _ Kei thinks, I can live with this.

 

Because at the end of his long, spiral-staircase spiel, what Kei realizes is that he doesn't hate any of it. He had frowned and grimaced and cursed at the absurd weather in each realm and then cried his eyes out when he finally found Kuroo in the middle of  _ literally nowhere, _ but if he ignores those parts, the parts where his heart was laid open and swimming in sadness, the last two weeks haven’t been all terrible. Diving isn't all terrible.

 

Kei has never been able to see the appeal of giving up any semblance of normalcy for a life constantly being tossed from the arms of one tidal wave to another. He thinks— Maybe—

 

“I’m glad you had fun.” Akiteru is smiling with his whole face now, the kind of cluelessly happy smile he used to give Kei when they were younger than this. When they were closer than this.

 

On any other day Kei would have clammed up here, the firewall around his emotions going up in the blink of an eye, pushing any semblance of reconciliation out of the picture. But on this day, Kei has finally taken a shower after weeks spent gallivanting around the universe. He's wearing a new pair of socks. He wants these things, if he's going to be totally honest with himself; he wants these things back.

 

“I— I don't think it was wrong, choosing to go back to POOLS.”

 

It's not a lot. Kei still isn't quite used to retracting his vocal filter, to minimizing the distance between his thoughts and the things he says out loud, but it's a start. It's a very big start. It's something like forgiveness.

 

Akiteru, the coda diver, the shameless ABBA fan, and his older brother with arms strong enough to hold up the entire world even when they were only kids, nods. He gets off the sofa, walks into the kitchen.

 

“Help me out with lunch,” He says over his shoulder. “We’re making pasta today.”

  
  


☉

  
  


Kuroo calls in the evening. Lying on his back on his UFO-patterned blankets, Kei has been on the brink of falling asleep for the better half of an hour. But then Kuroo calls, so he picks up.

 

“Hey,” Kuroo’s voice filters through the receiver. It's been less than a day since they last spoke, but Kei finds he's missed the sound of his voice terribly all the same. He can hear the city in the background, a warm wall of static and car horns. Kuroo must be outside.

 

“Hey,” he says back.

 

A pause. “Any plans for tonight?”

 

“I was thinking of joining Bokuto and the rest on their wild goose chase after you, but, well…”

 

Kuroo chuckles. “I’m flattered, but don't bother.”

 

“Huh. Where  _ are _ you, actually?”

 

“On a street with a really hip looking building that, uh—” There’s shuffling, and then the sound of shoes tap-tapping against the ground. “—Has a giant statue of Buddha inside. Also, there's a neat ramen place beside that, and a Lawson across the street.”

 

The Buddha statue ensconced inside a ‘hip looking building’ may have appeared in a newspaper article recently, but Kei can't remember which part of the city it has been installed in. He imagines Kuroo ducking his head inside, gaping at it, and then slinking back out. He imagines Kuroo. “Am I supposed to guess your location based off of that?”

 

“Nah, I’m just talking ‘cos I feel like it. Is that all right with you?” Kuroo replies. His voice is low and sweet like warm milk before bedtime, and it makes Kei feel a bit dizzy, even though he's lying down.

 

“Sure,” he says. “Take it away.”

 

Kuroo takes it away. He launches into a constant, stream-of-consciousness narration of where he is and where he's going, his attention snagging here and there on eclectic shopfronts and bits of eye-catching graffiti. It's a little like being led around by a tour guide, only Kei’s experiencing everything through Kuroo’s eyes, seeing the colors of the evening through every word Kuroo chooses to use. Kuroo would make a very good tour guide. He is cheerful and energetic and has something to say about every new place he steps into. Kei makes a mental note to tell him that later.

 

“I’m walking down a really narrow side road now, which I got onto by stepping off the main street. I think I’m in a residential area— there’s nothing but a bunch of houses. And a dog! There's a dog on someone’s front lawn, a golden retriever? He's smiling, Tsukki, I swear he's actually smiling. He looks satisfied with life. I love him.”

 

Listening to Kuroo’s voice is nice. Lying in bed with his phone pressed to his ear, Kuroo fawning over the pet turtle someone keeps in a tank outside their store, whose name is  _ Speedy Walker Flan, his name is kinda long but he's a darling, I hope Speedy Walker Flan goes far in life, _ Kei thinks that this is the most peaceful he has felt in months. He lets it wash over him like the ocean at low tide, kissing the coastline of his heart. He closes his eyes.

 

“Tokyo’s a beautiful city, isn't it,” Kuroo says some time later, although Kei’s not sure exactly how long it’s been.

 

Kei hums his agreement. He's not sure if Kuroo actually hears him; he can feel himself sinking into the bed and drifting away from wakefulness out of sheer comfort.

 

“I used to take a lot of walks around the city, just never in the evening. I was always too busy with school, or work, or whatever. But I should've done this earlier— I mean, wow, I think I could fall in love with this place all over again.”

 

_ I could fall in love with you all over again, too, _ Kei thinks sleepily. His limbs feel all tingly and light, like he's going to float away at any moment. His chest feels light.

 

Kei doesn't quite manage a reply, but Kuroo seems to be happy just getting the words out. Having finished being mesmerized by his surroundings, he keeps talking. “By the way, have I mentioned the clothing store? I passed by one a bit earlier, and it was called Moon and Stars. It reminded me of you.”

 

“Sappy shit.”

 

“Sappy, but street-savvy. Oh— I think I just saw the twentieth Family Mart for today, listen, I’ve been keeping count…”

 

This is the most he's heard Kuroo speak in months. This is the most peaceful Kei has felt in months.

 

“...I’m turning right, and there's a Thai milk tea store? I’ve never actually tried that before. Now I'm walking past this fancy Italian restaurant that's got a carved wooden storefront and everything, with mermaids and shit. That's pretty cool, Tsukki, you should see it—”

 

—Kei  _ has _ seen it. Kei knows exactly which Thai milk tea store he's talking about. it's got an orange-and-black color scheme going in the little stall at the end of the street, and on weekday afternoons there are always clumps of high schoolers loitering around outside, waiting for their orders. Kei has also seen the mermaid restaurant before, except it’s actually a bar, and on Friday nights it plays jazz and its patrons talk until sunrise. These are the places he is intimately familiar with, not necessarily by choice. Kei opens his eyes. He frowns at the ceiling.

 

“Really, Kuroo,” he asks flatly.

 

“The sun’s setting and it’s making this crepe store’s display goods look like three times as sexy, but anyway my point is the sun is  _ setting _ and this city is good looking as fuck, the whole place is soaked in gold and shit. Have you looked outside your window? I think you should look outside your window.” Kei can hear the smile in his voice, clear as day. He would say something, but he's smiling himself, grinning like an idiot even as he rolls out of bed and goes to the window.

 

Kuroo calls in the evening, and by the time he's made it halfway across the city to the street outside Kei’s apartment, it is almost nighttime. It's been less than a day since they last met, but Kei finds he has missed Kuroo terribly all the same.

 

He lifts the latch on his window and leans out over the edge, squinting against the glare, and there— there is Kuroo. In all his flannel shirt and black Nikes and shitty bird’s nest hair glory, smiling crookedly with his head tilted to one side. His phone still held up to his ear, his other hand shoved in his pocket. Looking up at Kei like  _ he's _ the sun, standing in a little patch of grass and gold, is Kuroo.

 

“Rapunzel, oh Rapunzel, let down your hair,” Kuroo calls dramatically, because he lives for the cheesiest parts of Disney movies even though he feigns indifference so very well. Kei doesn't need his phone to hear him anymore, not from his second-floor bedroom window.

 

“Shut up, Prince Charming,” Kei retorts, then hangs up right after that, and disappears from the window. He takes the steps two at a time going down, holding nothing but the whole beating mess of his heart. He runs out to meet him.

  
  


☉

  
  


_ POOLS Archives: _

 

_ On Destiny and Other Things _

_ Ushijima Wakatoshi (on active duty in Sector 377) _

 

_ Once upon a time, there were two boys. The first boy was born into a realm whose name we do not know even now, but it must have been a splendid kingdom, for it was full of turrets and towers and beautiful, emerald green forests. The second boy was born in Tokyo. They grew up in different places, always realms apart from each other. They grew up perfectly innocent. _

 

_ When the first boy was ten, he decided to go exploring past the known parts of the forest. He did not tell anyone this, although they certainly would have liked to know, for he was their crown prince, gifted with his smiles and his words and his hands, which played the piano beautifully. He did not tell anyone this, so when he fell into the lake hidden deep within the trees, nobody was there to save him. _

 

_ This was a part of the forest no one was supposed to step into. It stood to reason, therefore, that the lake was no ordinary lake either. It had not received new visitors in so long that when he fell in, the shock of it all opened up a path to the Flow, which emerged into the blue of the water and immediately took a liking to him. Only it was a strange, twisted kind of liking, the sort that destroys all your memories and sucks you in and leaves you in another realm entirely. In that single moment, the boy’s entire existence was destabilized. _

 

_ When the second boy was eight, he almost drowned in a swimming pool. It came as a surprise to both him and his parents, for he had always been a very proficient swimmer. For generations, his family had been involved in the affair of diving between realms, and so he, too, had inherited their affinity— for water, for diving, and for the Flow, whose judgment of you mattered more than life itself. It came as a surprise of the most unpleasant sort, so he pushed the memory away and tried to pretend it had never happened. _

 

_ What neither of them ever realized, is that when the first boy fell into the lake, the second boy was already standing in the water. And while it was true that they were realms and realms apart, separated by time and space and the universe itself, they were also inexplicably connected. Connected by the Flow. _

 

_ What neither of them ever realized, is that in the moment when the first boy’s existence destabilized like a boat tossed out into a storm, it was tied to the second boy’s soul. Their existences were joined together. _

 

_ Two years later, the two boys met again. They grew up together while the boy that was missing half his heart grew nervous, fidgety, drawn back towards the Flow by the shivering foundations of his soul. Finally, he left on a journey to find himself. Finally, he gave in. _

 

_ But the other boy, the one who once saw light at the bottom of the swimming pool, found him. And in the act of finding him, he saved him, too. He was a stabilizing force. A gentle kind of gravity. _

 

_ Like a wandering star led back to its lover, like a balloon pulled back down to the ground, like an anchor leading you home, the other boy held his hand, and held his entire heart, and saved him. _

 

_ Or perhaps it would be more apt to say that they saved each other. _

 

_ I have always scoffed at the idea of destiny and fate and soulmates. But I think it is time I let go of that old hurt, so the cicatrices may take away the dull edge of pain. I think it is time we reexamined our skepticism, the fabric of our own histories, our stories. _

 

_ Because once upon a time, there were two boys, and then they fell in love. _

  
  


☉

  
  


The coffee machines are working again.

 

No one knows how it happened, but sometime between Oikawa’s post-hangover grocery trip and last night, when they finally came back together, the mysterious alien interference jamming all their weary system controls had finally gone away. Incredulous, Kei asks the guy at the register about it,  _ what happened to the whole broken coffee machine pandemic in the city.  _ He just shrugs, rings up their change, and hands them their Styrofoam cups.

 

“I didn't know you liked  _ konbini _ coffee that much,” Kuroo comments after they've gone back outside.

 

Kei flushes a little. “It's not that, it's just— you weren't around, y’know, when they first stopped working, so it always reminded me of. Yeah.”

 

“Oh,” Kuroo says quietly. He reaches out with his free hand and threads their fingers together. Kei squeezes back lightly, not saying anything else.

 

By now, the sun has long since dipped beneath the city’s skipping-stone skyline. Above the crown of skyscrapers, the dark blue of the sky shimmers like sequined silk, illuminated faintly by the glow of a full moon. The two of them walk slowly down the sidewalk, sipping at their coffee. Comfortable, in their silence.

 

Once, Kei had been afraid of the city at night. The day Kuroo disappeared and Kei went looking for him instead of doing his literature homework, the streets he had known all his life somehow looked eerie and foreign. The feeling has never quite left him since then.

 

But today Kuroo is by his side, and they are holding hands, and just like earlier, when he’d pointed out pet turtles and strangely colored houses, he speaks up whenever something catches his attention. A building with a gorilla perched on top; a store with a life-sized cow proudly displayed outside; an antique telephone box. Kei swears he can see his eyes light up at all these small wonders. This is the Kuroo who convinced him that all the  _ konbini _ cashiers were secretly robots— the one with the heart made of origami hearts.

 

His voice is even nicer like this, up close, his Adam’s apple bobbing when he swallows and his lips curving around the tail-end of a word, the round edges of a grin. Kei gets so distracted watching him he stumbles over a drain cover in the ground, and has to lean on Kuroo to stay upright.

Later on, when they've disposed of their Styrofoam cups and the night is beginning to grow into itself properly, the sounds of the city slowly becoming more and more distant, Kei opens his mouth.

 

“I almost forgot, Kuroo, but uh, your bomber jacket—” Kei shrugs it from his shoulders, holds it out to him. They are standing beneath a streetlight, the lights illuminating the gold of Kuroo’s eyes.

 

Eyes, which crinkle at the edges with a smile. “You can keep it,” he says.

 

“I thought you liked it a lot.”

 

“I do. You gave it to me, after all. But you can keep it.”

 

“Why?”

 

“You've held onto it for all this time, I’m sure it doesn't smell like my super cool hair gel anymore anyway.”

 

“But—”

 

Kei wants to keep protesting, but Kuroo tugs the jacket out of his hands and pulls it over his head like a bridal veil at a wedding, only it's made of silk and shit and it's covering his eyes now, so he can't see anything. He can't see anything. He doesn't realize what's happening until he feels Kuroo’s calloused palms on his cheeks, warm and soft.

 

Kuroo kisses him.

 

The air doesn't smell like lavender. It smells like flowers and cigarette smoke and the ramen from the store they passed by just now. It smells like nine p.m., the city inhaling and exhaling in stuttered breaths around them. It smells like spring.

 

The air doesn't smell like lavender, which is how Kei knows he’s in the right place, and Kuroo tastes like black coffee and neon sign boards, which is how he knows it's the right time. Kuroo has to tiptoe a bit to reach him, Kei notices dizzily from beneath the jacket, and it sends a sugar rush shooting through him. He feels so much, he has to do something with himself or he’s going to tear the night up into strips of newspaper. He puts his hands on Kuroo’s waist. He pulls him closer.

 

In this moment, on a quiet street in the middle of Tokyo that he probably knows but can't remember the name of, Kuroo smiling against his lips, Kei thinks: he is home. This is the city he grew up in. The place that raised him out of his Christmas-tree childhood, that taught him how to jaywalk with his eyes closed, that reached for him through his bedroom window each morning to wake him up.

 

And this is Kuroo’s city, too, has been ever since he swept into it like a natural disaster with his stupid cherry soda and stupidly pretty face, so this is  _ their _ city now. The city they fell in love with, and fell in love in. This is home. Kei’s graduating from high school at the end of the year and he has no idea what he wants to do with himself afterwards, but maybe that's all right. Maybe that's the point, maybe it's okay to be clueless, maybe love is about growing up and growing into yourself and growing into the whole city of your heart even as the scenery changes around you, about moving forward without knowing what’s at the end of the tunnel. Kei has his head and his hands and his heart, the whole nightscape of it, which is a fragile, fleeting thing. But it is also strong. Time has not hardened them so much as it has made them kinder. The universe is never quite so cruel as to break the tangled red strings of fate apart.

 

So this is the great big map of everything. This is the story of Kuroo with the apocalypse between his ribs and Kei with the sharp mouth and wound-soft heart, and this is how they found each other. This is the trajectory of their footsteps across time and space, across oceans and deserts and mountains built as high as the heavens. Here, their child-young selves sunk into too-big armchairs; their hands making circles in the UFO-patterned blankets; their middle school uniforms hanging off their backs. Here, Kuroo’s figure glowing effervescent under the midnight streetlight, looking lost as all time; Kei’s breath caught in his throat as he stands outside the second music room; the two of them leaning against a signboard outside a  _ konbini _ at the height of summer, their fingers sticky with popsicle syrup. Kuroo’s is fizzy soda blue. Kei’s is pink, like strawberries.

 

But the map isn't static. It doesn't stop when the forest ends, when charted territory runs out. The map isn't static; it’s alive. For as long as Kei and Kuroo will be here, carrying the walking commentary of their lives in their jean pockets, it will keep on growing. For as long as they are in love with themselves and each other and the whole slip-sliding thunderstorm landscape of the world, it will keep expanding. They are the ones with the pencils and the stories to tell. They are the ones who will choose how the narrative goes forward.

 

Kei understands this, finally. He has spent too much of his life being afraid, counting daydreams in class, blocking out the nightmares he always had where Kuroo was there and he couldn't speak a word out of his silence. He has spent so much of his life in one place. He still doesn't know what he's going to do with himself after he graduates, but he’ll figure it out eventually. He’ll figure it out eventually.

 

Years later, someone will ask him how it all began, and Kei will say  _ he told me he loved me. _

 

For now, he lets himself smile like an idiot into their kiss, too, and breathes Kuroo in, and closes his eyes.

  
  


☉

  
  


“I hope you will have no qualms about keeping the jacket now,” Kuroo says, later. He licks his lips. They are significantly redder than they were before.

 

The jacket had fallen a bit further off his head earlier, so Kei can see again. His hands are still at Kuroo’s waist. He thumbs at the fabric of his shirt absently. “Just the jacket?”

 

Kuroo grins. “Well, aren't you a precocious one.”

 

“I was born like this. I'm not changing who I am for some loser with shit hair.”

 

“Oho? Hmm… How about this: you can keep me too.”

 

“Wait. That’s not what I meant.” Kei flushes, tripping over his words all over again in spite of all his recently-accumulated life experience. Suddenly, he feels shy.

 

Kuroo’s hands slide further down. He starts playing with the hair at the nape of Kei’s neck. “I think I’ve had enough of diving for a while.”

 

His touch is so tender, Kei almost wants to cry again, but he keeps himself in check this time. “Then what are you gonna do now?”

 

“I dunno. Maybe I’ll join a band, start playing piano seriously again, go deep-sea diving in Antarctica—”

 

“—Please don't do that last one—”

 

“—Ha, I’m kidding, don't worry. But yeah. I’ll figure something out.”

 

Kei hums, and rests his chin on his shoulder. He looks out at the road stretching out behind them, the way the moon leaves everything looking silvery and faint, like a dream. The city is sleepless tonight as well, buzzing with neon lights and brilliant laughter, all the pedestrians on the roads on their way to falling in love. Kuroo’s chest is warm where it's pressed against his, his heartbeat thrumming beneath his skin.

 

He runs his hands gently through Kei’s hair. “Did I ever tell you I could play the guitar?”

 

“No you didn’t, asshole.”

 

“Mmm. Well, I can. And I’m pretty good at it.” Kuroo pauses. “I could probably serenade you under the stars and all that shit.”

 

“There are hardly any stars in Tokyo, Kuroo.”

 

“Okay, Tsukki, okay.”

 

“...But please do. Serenade me, I mean, if you want to. I like your voice. It's— like an old song on the radio. A cheesy love song from the nineties.”

 

Kuroo leans out of their embrace so he can laugh at him. “That's the coolest compliment I've ever gotten— I think I love you? Yeah. I love you.”

 

Kei grumbles under his breath, “If you keep saying it, it's going to lose effect.”

 

“You're just embarrassed, aren't you?”

 

“That's it, I’m leaving,” he declares, and then steps away from Kuroo, and begins walking very resolutely down the street. He gives up after three and a half paces, turning to look over his shoulder.

 

Kuroo is standing in the moonlight, looking delicate as a Renaissance painting, looking close enough to touch. He's wearing a clumsy, crooked smile, the gentle curve of his lips lopsided and lovely. His gaze is soft enough to melt snow.

 

“Then I’m coming, too,” Kuroo says, and then goes to meet him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> WE DID IT!!!! I DID !!!! IT!!! YOU DID IT!!!! HOLY FUCKING SHIT  
> i first conceptualized this the night after i posted aperture, and i was so excited about it i woke up at six o'clock on a sunday. when i typed out the entire plot outline in one go during my philosophy lecture because it was boring, the whole goddamn chronology of events and everything, i honestly didn't think that i'd ever finish it. it seemed like just something pretty, a nice concept, a thing that i could entertain in theory but would never be able to pull off in real life. i didn't believe, for a moment, that i'd actually write it. THEN I WROTE IT and i started posting it and you guys were all so, so sweet with all your comments that i kept on writing it and then actually finished it. it took me 5 good weeks of slugging through classes and hell and a lot of feelings for the tsukishima and kuroo i put together for this story  
> i've grown quite fond of them! it's been a really great experience. getting to plan things and actually work with a narrative was so much fun, and an incredible process, and having people react to things you put in for shits and giggles was incredible. you have been an incredible readership. seriously, i couldn't have done it without you guys. ITS CHEESY BUT TRUE  
> once again, thank you for following tsukishima on his journey through time and space and love. i have some really weird plans for further obscure as all hell au's, but i'm putting myself on a strict writing ban until my finals end at the beginning of october. nonetheless, you can find me on twitter where i will continue yelling until i die of lack of sleep or something, and if this story made you feel something i would love to hear from you in the comments about it!
> 
> and so: the great big map of everything comes to an end (but only in text; in truth they go on, and they go on)
> 
> have a good one


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